


in·car·nate

by bygoneboy



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Time, Low Chaos (Dishonored), M/M, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Temporarily Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 15:07:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5590840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygoneboy/pseuds/bygoneboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Why have not we an immortal soul?" asked the little mermaid mournfully. "I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day."</i> </p><p>  <i>"You must not think of that," said the witch, "unless a man were to love you. And if all his thoughts and all his love were fixed upon you, and he promised to be true to you here and hereafter-- then his soul would glide into your body and you would obtain a share in the future happiness of mankind. He would give a soul to you, and retain his own as well.</i></p><p>  <i>But this can never happen."</i></p><p>- Hans Christian Andersen</p><p>---</p><p>Yet another one of those human!Outsider fics, inspired by the original tale of The Little Mermaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART I // THE CHOSEN

**Author's Note:**

> i gave the void the ability to think and speak, i hope it doesn't bother anybody too much ;u;
> 
> (the void is basically the sea witch, sorry)

 

_THE SEA : I’ve swallowed so many hearts and, oh God, I’m still mine alone._

— Excerpt from “Mother, Bring Me A Lover As Wild As Me”, Kamilla S.

 

The Void’s Chosen have loved him before.

 

With Vera, it had been something carnal. A forbidden thing. She was not supposed to, and so, true to her nature, she did. And oh, they’d had a lovely time, while it lasted. He had danced her dizzy, drunken, _dearest Vera, dearest, darling._ And that was the way she had loved him.

 

But Vera had often enjoyed playing with fire. She had adored that the substance of his veins ran with the stuff of storms, of the untamed, of ferality—

 

When she had been a child, she had saddled and broken a stallion, simply to prove that she could.

 

Breaking the Void was an impossibility she did not seem to comprehend. 

 

In her eyes, the Outsider had been hers. A sweet, savage thing, kept like the birds that she caged, singing shrilly for freedom. So after he had blackened her heart, he had plucked out those pretty eyes, too. And it was only then, after she had cried, and clawed bloody rivers down her smooth cheeks, and begged blindly for his forgiveness, that she had remembered. 

 

He is a creature too wild to be bound.

 

The freest spirit any world has ever known— he has lived for 4000 years, of course the Void’s Chosen have loved him.

 

It is why it does not come as a surprise, when Corvo Attano kneels, presses his lips to the shrine’s wooden grain with the promise of his very own soul.

 

The carving in his hands is crudely made, when compared to the vast, intricate offerings he has received in the decades of his worship. But the Outsider sees in him the hours he had spent bent over it, whittling away in the pub attic with the knife he’d pocketed from the kitchens. How many carvings before this one had shattered in his hands. How many times he had splintered the bone, sliced his fingertips on the sharp blade.

 

The Outsider knows what worship looks like.

 

This is not it.

 

“Going to a party?”

 

Corvo looks at him with a fierce kind of desperation, when he bleeds in through the veil of the Void. “Lady Boyle’s,” he murmurs. He is soft-spoken, for everything he has endured. It had seemed strange, the first time they had spoken. Now, unchanged still after the months of chaos, it is nothing short of fascinating.

 

“Is that what you dreamed of?” he questions, drifting toward Corvo’s offering, placed carefully on the edge of the shrine. “All those months in Coldridge, waiting for the executioner?”

 

“No,” says Corvo, hoarsely. He goes a little rigid as the Outsider takes the carving in his hands.

 

“Truly?” He runs thin, pale fingers over the piece, the chips in the bone. “Not of wealth, beautiful women, Tyvian wine…”

 

Something in Corvo’s face sets, in resolve. “I dreamed of you,” he replies. “Inside of my cell. You spoke to me.”

 

“I had nothing to do with your escape, Corvo.”

 

“Even so. You were there.”

 

It is obvious that he has more to say. It is in the tense set of his body, in the way his mouth shifts— but he falters, and does not continue.

 

The Outsider flicks black eyes up to meet his.

 

“And your offering?” he asks, lowly.

 

He can see the heartbeat in the Serkonan’s throat, pulsing quick, and hard. The gesture toward the carving is clumsy. “I— I thought you would understand.”

 

One twist, two loops. Spiritual connection, steadfast allegiance, eternal loyalty. Long-dead sailors had given them to the sweethearts they left behind. Corvo watches him with fear in his eyes, longing in his silence, and the Outsider—

 

The Outsider knows what worship looks like, and he knows what hunger looks like, too.

 

Corvo Attano, heart standing out against his ribs, is starving.

 

“Enjoy the party,” he answers.

 

And the carving tumbles back onto the shrine, past fast-fading fingers and a curious half-smile.

 

The Void surges around him as he rematerializes, muddled and haughty. **A reprimand would serve the pariah right,** it muses, **not his sight—at least, not until his work has been finished. But a finger, to the knuckle. His tongue, perhaps.**

 

 _It is unimportant,_ the Outsider parries, giving himself away to the lack of gravity, the uncanny weightlessness that is home, so familiar to him. His fingertips are still warm from the smooth graze of the bone against his skin. _It does not interfere._

 

The Void remembers gilded cages, remembers Vera Moray. **His tongue, yes, rip the hunger from his throa** **t—**

 

_All mortals hunger; he is not the first._

 

**Rip out his tongue.**

 

He grows sharp, then, with something like rage. _It does not interfere—_

 

The Void swells, pulsing furiously around him, **RIP OUT HIS TONGUE, RIP OUT HIS TONGUE, _RIP OUT HIS TONGUE—_**

 

He does not.

 

He takes his voice, instead. 

 

—

 

It is a pleasing diversion, and it only lasts a few days. Corvo’s brutal, night-terror screams are reduced to sharp, violent gasps of air; in the morning, he grasps at his sheets in a panic, throat bloody and raw from the force of silent pleas. Cecilia brews him hot tea to soothe his scared, wild eyes and wooden words. Callista smooths tangles from his damp forehead, tells him to rest easy. He does not give up conversation lightly, pointing and pantomiming, but in the end he turns his head away and closes his eyes, his efforts yielding nothing. 

 

Emily finds him on the third evening of his punishment, shut away in his attic room. She says nothing, as she clambers up onto his mattress. She simply hands him a sheaf of paper, and an oddly sorted collection of graphite stubs, and then they draw together, instead of talking.

 

He draws her mother.

 

She draws him.

 

He draws her, drawing him.

 

She draws a slim, tall man, with black otter eyes.

 

Corvo flinches, when she shows it to him. When she falls asleep, smears of graphite in her hair and on her hands, he holds an oil flame to the corner of the paper, and watches the drawing burn, frantic, unraveling, overwrought.

 

When he wakes the next morning, his voice has been returned to him.

 

He waits until Emily kisses his forehead and trots off to breakfast, before he begins to pace the creaky floors, wearing a weary path that builds mountains of anger, tight shoulders radiating frustration.

 

(The Outsider sees the whalebone carving on his bedside table, and the way that Corvo takes it in his hand, tracing the same paths that the Outsider’s fingers had taken.)

 

“I will not pretend to understand why,” he says, out loud. His voice quavers, as if he is afraid to lose it again. “But you could have the decency to face me, at least.”

 

(Corvo tucks the carving beneath his shirt. His heart presses against it, and for an insane moment, the Outsider thinks he can feel an answering drumbeat, in his own chest.)

 

The Void settles, satisfied. **It is good, to remind the Chosen of your nature.**

 

(The Outsider watches Corvo watch the empty room, waiting for an answer they both know will not come, and thinks: _he is good, too.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is kind of continuation of a oneshot i did a month or so ago. i'm stupidly in trash love with these two...again


	2. PART II // SCRIPTURES OF THE VOID

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> puttin this up real quick and then i gotta go watch downton abbey B) 
> 
> no shameeee

_The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes; it doesn’t lie. You ask the sea, what can you promise me and it speaks the truth; it says erasure._

_— Louise Glück_

 

The Outsider has lived for 4000 years, and for 4000 years, he has watched the world turn beneath him.

 

He has seen generations tumble by. Daughters turning to mothers turning to grandmothers. Their descendants pressing flowers to their graves. The flowers crumbling into dust and their bones crumbling with them, only to overturn centuries later to bury the blue body of a stillborn.

 

He has watched children age in the blink of an eye.

 

He has watched tears fall on the very same walkway of a first kiss, a decade before.

 

And he has always watched the sailors, the cards that they flipped between their fingers, the way that they smoked and laughed and shouted themselves hoarse into the ocean waves.

 

_A thousand years ago there was another city on this spot._

 

Death.

 

Birth.

 

_The people carved the bones of whales._

 

Death. 

 

Rebirth.

 

_They inscribed them with my Mark—_

 

Corvo.

 

For months the man had simply been a dark shadow at the Empress’s side; he remembers not thinking anything of him, at first. But that indifference had shifted on a cold spring morning in the palace gardens, a body at the Lord Protector's feet, and red dripping from his hands.

 

The incident was one of the earlier assassination attempts on Jessamine’s life. A crude job, done in the interest of foreign power, not any interest to him.

 

But the man with the blood on his blade—

 

Corvo had spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning it, scrubbing at the bloodstains with a wounded expression, a frantic sickness, and the Outsider had watched. Was it the attack on his Empress that had thrown him off balance— or the killing itself? What kind of bodyguard tormented himself over taking a life? What kind of hero ducked the celebration to retch over a privy?

 

The young Lord Protector had had nightmares for weeks, and the Outsider remembers thinking—

 

_He is interesting._

 

His tomorrows were clouded, his future a blank slate.

 

_Special._

 

He had not gifted Corvo with his Mark until years after, but that, he thinks, was the morning he had truly Chosen him.

 

_Something in him—_

 

The Outsider has lived for 4000 years, and for 4000 years, he has lived soullessly.

 

Still, he has often wondered what it would be like to be Chosen, rather than to Choose.

 

It is one of the reasons that he is so drawn to the mortal world, he supposes, why he finds the seldom-broken monotony of their lives— and their _dreams_ — so endlessly fascinating. When he wishes it, the Void parts curtain-like for him, manifesting every doorway of the unconscious minds of the living world, and he sifts through them, the dreams, nightmares, fantasies, terrors.

 

The weepers dream of blood, and chaos, and death. The sailors dream of the great whales beneath green waves, and the loneliness of a life at sea. The young empress dreams of her mother’s laughter, and counting to ten, and the warm cobblestone of the palace courtyard.

 

Corvo—

 

The Void blackens, curling tightly around his ankles.

 

**Perhaps his mind is better off without your judgement.**

 

He slips easily out of its grip. _I have seen his dreams before. If I wish to do so again, I will._

 

But as he moves toward the doorway to Corvo’s subconscious, the tear in the Veil stitches shut.

 

He raises a hand. The force around him does not bend. _Open it_.

 

**There are some things that even you, perhaps, are not meant to bear witness to.**

 

 _Open it,_ he commands, something darker rising in him. _I will not ask again._

 

The Void shudders, as if in laughter— or bitterness; its raw, animal sentience makes it difficult to tell.

 

**You would do well to hate him, for this.**

 

And the veil rips open.

 

—

 

Dipping into Corvo’s mind is simple enough. He has done it before, meeting him in the purgatory of his dreams to pull him into the shapeless Void— but now he is here to observe. To— _to what?—_ simply to gauge the stability of his mind. To prove his curiosity right.

 

He steadies himself as the dream materializes around him, chunks of the unconscious falling into place.

 

When the fragments settle—

 

The scene in front of him is as alien to the Outsider as whalesong is familiar.

 

The dream is smudged, blurred. Hazy around the edges, as if seen through thick glass, or beneath the ocean waves. There are wooden floors, a low-cut ceiling— it is Corvo’s attic room, or at least resembles it well-enough, with the same windows, warped and thick with dust. The same table, various trinkets and carvings casting strange shadows in the flicker of the lamp’s blue-whale glow. The bed, thin mattress, rickety metal frame, blankets twisted around Corvo and—

 

And around him.

 

A mirror has been propped up against the desk across from him and he startles, catching a glance of his reflection.

 

The resemblance is striking.

 

Oil-soft hair.

 

Lucid-pale skin.

 

A vacant expression, but it is not _him._

 

It is only a projection. A weak imitation of what he supposes the assassin craves from him, some kind of wild physical release— Vera had desired him in a cage, Corvo desires him in a bed, yes, of course, it is uncomplicated. The replica is an Other, a twisted knockoff, composed of the same transparent, ludicrous stuff of all mortals’ so-called _needs,_ _wants._

 

But when he meets the eyes of his own reflection again, he realizes, suddenly—

 

They are still slate-black.

 

And the only thing separating Corvo’s projection of him from his own true form—

 

Is the whalebone carving, tied around his neck.

 

On the mattress beside him Corvo stirs, blinking up at him sluggishly. “Hmm. Hello.”

 

He should end this now. He should pull him into the Void, he should demand reprimand, punishment—

 

“Hello,” he replies.

 

His voice is flat and even and echoes, in the open spread of the dream-verse.

 

It cannot do any harm. It will not interfere.

 

It is only a dream.

 

Corvo cracks a yawn, swipes sleep from his eyes. When he speaks it is as if they are picking up the trail of a conversation they had briefly dropped, “is it true, that you don’t sleep?”

 

“I could, if I wished to,” says the Outsider. Corvo’s cheek is pillow-creased, his hair sleep-mussed; he has never seen the assassin this way before. “But no, I do not require it.”

 

“Fascinating,” Corvo says, and smiles, a private joke.

 

“I do not understand—”

 

He cuts off abruptly as Corvo catches his wrist in his fingers, lifts it to his mouth. His lips graze the back of the Outsider’s hand in a gesture that is both chaste and intimate.

 

_I do not understand you._

 

“You are shaking,” he says, instead.

 

“Shivering,” corrects Corvo. “You’re— you’re always cold.”

 

Always.

 

_Always?_

 

_How many times has he dreamed of—_

 

The Outsider tugs Corvo’s hand back toward him and bows his head over it, skimming the thickly-inked Mark with a fingertip. There is a strange pull forming in his chest, a fishhook caught around something tangled. He has often heard sailors speak of sea-sickness. He imagines this is what it would feel like.

 

“I don’t mind,” continues Corvo, watching as he traces the Mark pensively. “It’s a small price to pay.”

 

“And if you freeze?”

 

Corvo laughs. “Aren’t you bleak tonight.”

 

“I am rational.”

 

“Do you think I would prefer to have you another way?”

 

The experience of nausea swells. He doesn’t wish to hear it, doesn’t care to know the answer—

 

“Because I don’t,” Corvo adds, more gently. “I never have.”

 

His un-Marked hand finds its way to the smooth, ageless contour of the Outsider’s jaw and his fingers rest there, thumb pressing at the corner of his mouth. Openly sentimental, for all of the god’s apathy.

 

“You are bizarre,” says the Outsider flatly.

 

“How so?”

 

He narrows black eyes. “Most mortals would try to shape me into one of their own.”

 

“They would try,” Corvo agrees. To his irritation, the assassin sounds amused.

 

“And you will not?” His own tone sours. “Men are treacherous, and petty, I have told you this before.”

 

“And I have told you,” Corvo cradles his cheek in his palm, a trivial attempt to soothe his temper, “that I would serve you for the rest of my eternity, if only you would have me—”

 

“I know how you wish to _serve_ me,” the Outsider snarls, jerking away from his touch. “Your ignorance is pathetic— _gods do not love._ ”

 

For a long moment Corvo looks at him, his body impossibly still, his face unreadable.

 

Then something in his expression shifts.

 

Breaks.

 

He turns away to hide it, his eyes trained on the ceiling above. “You’ve made that clear,” he says quietly. “I have never expected anything from you.”

 

And it is true.

 

Corvo has never seen them as equals.

 

Has never understood him as anything but deathless.

 

Heartless.

 

Even in his dreams.

 

“Corvo,” says the Outsider, but nothing else comes to mind; in the stretch of his silence Corvo sighs, a soft, bitter thing.

 

“I would apologize if I meant it,” the assassin mutters at last.

 

“Apologies are insignificant.”

 

“Just like loyalty?”

 

“Hush,” says the Outsider, with the coldness of an immortal, without the gentleness of a lover. “I will stay until you are asleep.”

 

Corvo hesitates.

 

Then leans into him, fingers curling against the narrow span of his chest.

 

“I am already sleeping,” he murmurs, before his eyes fall closed. “You wouldn’t be here, if I was not.”


	3. PART III // ICARUS

_All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life._

_— Herman Melville_

 

Before he was the Outsider, he had been something else.

 

Someone.

 

Someone else.

 

This is is all he knows.

 

He is a curious creature by nature, imprinting himself onto a humanity he does not belong to— but his history he has left untouched. The boy he had been was buried centuries ago, frozen beneath ice-capped skin and empty black eyes. What purpose could it possibly serve, to remember? Whatever family he had once belonged to means nothing to him now. His name, only letters. His soul—

 

He did have had a soul, once.

 

He should not want to remember.

 

_Why does he want to remember?_

 

Corvo has never understood him as anything but deathless, heartless—

 

But before he was the Outsider, he was neither. 

 

Back in the spans of the Void he drifts, through the hollow of space and time, whalebone whispering around him, whalesong reverberating in his chest. He does not know for how long he wanders, in the blank canvas of his world— he only knows that despite his efforts, he can still feel Corvo’s breath hot on his skin, can remember the curve of his mouth with as much detail as if he were there beside him.

 

His mind is a storm. He is lost in the turmoil— shipwrecked, drowning—

 

He has failed to remember that the Void is not his Kingdom, and he is not its King. How easy it had been, to forget that he was an offering, and nothing more.

 

**You were warned.**

 

The Void pools around him, black ink tides crashing down at his ankles, rising rapidly to his waist. _How often does he dream of me?_ the Outsider demands, the fishhook behind his ribs splitting, ripping the words free. _Why did you not say, why has he not been reprimanded—_

 

**Rip out his tongue.**

 

 _That’s not what I meant!_ He had taken Vera’s eyes and laughed, as the blood had run little rivers down her chin. He imagines Corvo’s solemn, sweet mouth swimming in a pool of thick iron-red and the hook slips, snags, he wonders— is this pain? _He, he claims he does not want to use me, that he wants me, of all things, to use him! This must be some brand of witchcraft—_

 

**You know it is not.**

 

The Outsider strains, heaves against the feeling. It is like he is one of the beached whales on Dunwall's stony shores, struggling to return to open water— and yet, somehow, he has already begun to learn to breathe on land. He cries out, truly shaken for the first time in his memory, _what is he doing to me?_

 

 **The Chosen have loved you before,** the Void hums, hanging heavy around him.

 

 _Yes,_ _but none—_

 

None like this.

 

_With Vera it was something carnal._

 

With Corvo—

 

**You do not control fate. You are at its whim, like any mortal.**

 

 _I have lived,_ the Outsider retorts, _for 4000 years—_

 

 **And still,** comes the soft, dangerous answer, **you are not above death.**

 

If he could feel fear—

 

The hook catches, and winds tight around his throat.

 

**It would be wise not to visit him there again.**

 

Anger is of the Void. Rage, spite, retribution are of the Void.

 

Not fear. Not— _this,_ the product of whatever undue influence Corvo has gained over him. **Gods do not want,** the Void whispers, and somehow, its warnings are more a threat than its fury.

 

He does not beg— gods do not— and yet, he wavers. _Then how— how do you suggest I free myself, from him?_

 

**Your pariah will attempt to uproot the Lord Regent, tonight. You will appear to him, when he calls upon your shrine.**

 

_And after that?_

 

**I will decide what kind of freedom you warrant.**

 

There is, of course, more to be said.

 

But the Outsider does not stay to hear it. 

 

 

—

 

 

Corvo is already kneeling at the Shrine when he arrives, the torturer’s corpse bloody and cold on the floor.

 

He materializes and at once, the assassin’s eyes are fixed on him, steady, ardent, _Corvo._ The anchor-weight in his chest gives way, suddenly, _dear Corvo—_

 

“What an impressive sight you make,” he intones, folding his arms tight across his chest like it will deflect the terribly bare-hearted way Corvo is looking at him. “On your way to face the Lord Regent—”

 

“I dreamed of you last night,” Corvo says, quietly.

 

A dark, fierce current courses through him. He digs his fingers into his forearms, to stave it off. “Did you?”

 

Corvo fidgets, one hand toying at the collar of his jacket— the whalebone carving, perhaps, hangs hidden underneath, the cord knotted around his neck. “I dreamed— clearly. More clearly than…than I ever have. You took my hand. You—” He glances away. “I don’t think you’d like to hear most of the details, but I’m afraid there are quite a few images that won’t leave me.”

 

“And how does this concern me?” 

 

When Corvo looks back at him his eyes are aflame. “What?” he asks, bitterly. “Not interesting enough for you?”

 

“Why should it be?”

 

“You were— so clear.” The set of his jaw is stubborn, but the Outsider can see the tremors in his hands, as he grips the edge of the shrine. “I saw you as clearly as I see you now, and I— I want you to tell me, truthfully, was it you?”

 

“Dreams are only the stuff of your imagination,” the Outsider replies. “Mens’ minds are fickle— treacherous, petty—”

 

“You have told me this before,” Corvo finishes, gentler, and something radiant and knowing dawns in his face.

 

In a shattering, radical beat of bewilderment, the Outsider is at a loss for what to say.

 

“I did not come here to stand witness to your fantasies,” he snaps at last.

 

“Then what did you come here for?”

 

“To— to—” the Outsider seethes, snarls, “you _love_ me,” he accuses, and Corvo flinches.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Then you must understand I cannot possibly bear such a weakness—”

 

Corvo’s face tightens. “I’ve never claimed to understand you.”

 

“ _Still_ ,” he gestures, furiously, “you know me better than _every one of your kind_ —”

 

“And I know,” Corvo replies, “that what I want is impossible.”

 

He turns, sharply, on his heel.

 

“If you have nothing useful for me— there are more important things at stake, here.”

 

He steps away.

 

_This _— this_ is not what I intended—_

 

“Hold a moment,” says the Outsider, abruptly. “Corvo.”

 

Hope has power, more so than anger.

 

Corvo looks back.

 

“Build me a shrine,” the Outsider tells him. There is a disturbing buzz settling into the Void— even from here, he can feel it— but he turns a blind eye. “An altar, wooden, with whalebone and incense, near to your side.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I require it.”

 

Corvo exhales, short-tempered. “Why,” he repeats.

 

Gods do not lie, and the Outsider does not, either.

 

He simply chooses not to answer.

 

“Do as I’ve instructed,” he says, instead. “Tomorrow night, I will come to you.”

 

Corvo shakes his head, slowly, but the Outsider can see the cracks he has made, and the painful longing surging beneath. “Gods do not love,” Corvo reminds him; his voice breaks, on the final word, but still he presses on. “It wouldn’t matter what I sacrificed, I could carve you a temple with my bare hands and it would change nothing. You can’t claim to have a heart, when you have no soul—”

 

“Build me a shrine, Corvo,” the Outsider repeats. “And then we will see.”

 

 **Gods do not love,** hisses the Void, as Corvo vanishes back into the dusk of the Tower halls. **Gods do not lie.**

 

 _Then perhaps,_ thinks the Outsider, _I am not truly a god._

 

**YOU—**

 

The Void shudders, and the mortal sphere dissolves around him.

 

Darkness creeps along the corners of his vision as it twists, widening into endless fields of bone-thin shards, razor-sharp, dagger-tipped, roiling, **you are what I have made you.**

 

 _No!_ And there is something thrilling running through his veins, now, something hot and human that only Corvo can breathe into him, _I am of my own will, you must allow me freedom—_

 

**You were an offering.**

 

_You made me believe that I was more—_

 

**YOU WERE AN OFFERING.**

 

_And what am I now?_

 

 ** _NOTHING,_** the Void answers, the rabid scream of a dying thing, cold metal screeching slowly against metal, teeth sinking into the back of his neck, **_NOTHING OF THIS WORLD._**

 

And towering waves open up beneath him, black and ice-capped, and he is falling, falling, falling—

 

 

—

 

 

He plunges into the ocean, and the water swallows him whole.

 

_Fallen._

 

The shock rattles him but he kicks his way to the surface. Banishment is a true punishment— from the depths of the human world, it will take him a few days to find a veil back into the Void— but he will return. He calls his magic to him, to lift him above the waves—

 

And nothing happens.

 

The cold anchor-weight plunges back into his stomach.

 

He reaches, a second time, into the bottom-depths of his self, seeking the familiar flow of the Void’s strength in him, and finds—

 

Nothing.

 

The Outsider—

 

The outsider—

 

He is empty.

 

Hollowed, but for the choking terror in his throat, and the beating, alien heart in his chest.

 

Lightning cracks across the sky, thunder roaring in his ears; his vision goes dizzy, white-noise panic sending him reeling. The seawater is so cold that it burns and he writhes, fighting to keep his head above the surface.

 

He does not see the first wave until it is already unfurling over his head.

 

It crashes over him, yanking him down, down, down, crushing the air from his lungs, tumbling him head over heels. Everything around him is black water. No sense of gravity, of direction. He thrashes, clothes clinging sodden to the thin frame of his body, desperately searching for open sky, and the saltwater sea stings his eyes and floods his mouth. He chokes on it, swallows, retches, he has never had to _breathe_ before, he cannot _breathe—_

 

He breaks the surface.

 

Air floods his lungs and he gulps it down greedily. His throat is raw and his head throbs and pin-point stars swim across his vision; out of the corner of his weak, weeping eyes a second wave swells up.

 

Breaks down.

 

A third.

 

Pulls him under.

 

He is plunging down again, limbs striking out helplessly for something to grasp on to. Pockets of air stream from his mouth as he screams, wordlessly, he thinks, _this is it._

 

_I will not survive this._

 

 _Corvo,_ he thinks, _dear, dearest Corvo—_

 

The light from the whaling ship blinds him, when he breaks the surface again. Past the rush of the ocean he hears the sailors’ shouts and the clang of the bell: _man overboard!_

 

He sobs.

 

Wails, _I am no man—_

 

They do not hear him.

 

It does not matter.

 

A rope is tossed his way but his hands are frozen and cannot close around it. One of the sailors dives into the water and swims with broad, strong strokes toward him.

 

“Don’t struggle,” he calls out over the storm, tugging him toward the ship ladder and wrapping the rope tightly around his wrist. “You’ll take us both down if you do _—_ ”

 

The outsider obeys. He does not seem to have the strength to do anything else, anything more.

 

They haul him aboard and take him below decks and sit him by the stove. They peel off his soaked thin clothes and redress him in soft wool. They wrap him in thick-threaded pattern quilts, and rub warmth into his arms and legs, and murmur soothing things while his teeth chatter and his body trembles.

 

And then they leave him, one-by-one, until only the old, weather-creased face of the captain remains, paging quietly through a yellowed book in the corner.

 

The ship rolls gently through the fading winds. Whale oil crackles and sparks in the stove flames. The captain turns page after page.

 

And the outsider cries, uncontrollably, watching the blue oil burn.

 

 

—

 

 

He does not remember falling asleep _— o_ f course, he will soon learn that most men do not _—_ but the moment his eyes flutter open, the memory of his fall rushes back.

 

He hates that he weeps— _does it ever end?—_ but unfortunately, hate does nothing to curb it. There is too much in him. Too much surging against his ribs, he cannot hold it in.

 

It wakes the captain.

 

He jolts upright and blinks over at him blearily, his book still propped on his chest. “Aha,” he says. “Still kicking, good.”

 

The outsider turns sharply to face him, expression contorted, face tear-streaked. His throat sears, from the scratch of salt. Bleating, animal stammers are all that he manages, when he attempts to speak.

 

The captain holds up a hand. “No, no— take it slow, son. It ain’t easy, coming back after a shipwreck. You’re lucky we found you when we did, less than a quarter hour and you would’ve drowned, for sure.”

 

His voice is cracked and weak and does not sound like his, when he does find it. “It— it was not a shipwreck.”

 

The captain raises bristly eyebrows. “Oh?”

 

“I—” he coughs, his chest rattles, “fell.”

 

“Is that so?”

 

“Yes, it was— I was banished, and I fell.”

 

“Ah,” says the captain, nodding gravely, rubbing at his beard with a spider-veined hand. “Yes, of course. Well, in any case, we may need to pick up a spot of medicine for you, next time we make port. And you should catch some more sleep, sailor. Rest those tired blue eyes, hmm?”

 

“My eyes are not blue,” the outsider tells him.

 

“Right,” he agrees, amiably, and rises from his chair to stretch, frail joints popping. “I’ll check in on you in a bit— but for now, I’ve got a crew to manage.”

 

“Wait—”

 

The captain pauses, shuffling toward the cabin door.

 

“How long until you make port in Dunwall?” the outsider asks. “There is something— there is someone there, that I need.”

 

“We’re just off the shores of Tyvia at the moment,” the captain replies, rubbing the back of his neck. “And we’ll be making stops along the way—”

 

“How long?” he demands, his hands twisting in his lap, the unfamiliar pulse of his heart quickening.

 

“Three months,” comes the answer, gentle. “At the very least.”

 

Something wraps around his chest and _squeezes._

 

_Three months, thirteen weeks, ninety-one days—_

 

When the captain smiles it creases sad at the corners. The door clunks shut with a soft finality.

 

He no longer has to imagine what it would be like, to cry out for someone, and receive nothing in return.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i like this chapter a lot right now but that will probably change in the next thirty minutes haha
> 
> i finished this a while ago but my grandfather passed away recently, and so i've been spending most my days with my family. there will also probably be a pretty lengthy lapse between this chapter and the next-- there's a lot going on with me-- but i am glad to be back writing again and i really do love this story, i hope you're enjoying it as well <3


	4. PART IV // ADRIFT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _having trouble with your love life? get advice from the dude who murdered your ex-girlfriend:_ in which i spent a lot of time trying to memorize the isles’ calendar, everyone has probably had a little crush on the outsider at some point, and, like me, corvo is _not_ a morning person

_There's a queer streak in human natures, he said, men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist._

_More than men come back, I said._

_— Leland Hall_

“Why don’t you marry,” says Emily.

 

She does not ask. Empresses learn not to, no matter how young. Only three months on the throne and she has already begun to speak with the grace and eloquence she requires, the cool tone of voice she will need when listing demands.

 

To him, of course, she will be Emily first, and always— with Jessamine’s dark liquid eyes and puckish grin, and his too-thick, tangled hair. It is hard to forget that he had held her as an infant, watched as her tiny fingers had clasped around his thumb.

 

Someday, she will not need him.

 

He is endlessly relieved that that day is still long off.

 

It is too soon, to let go— as it is, he has just begun to regain his footing, from the sickening, free-falling feeling of loss. Jessamine, taken from him first, and then, so soon after—

 

His right hand goes unconsciously to the Mark on his left, and he exhales quietly, a resentful thing. What had he promised himself he would do, retching and half-conscious in the whalers’ prison?

 

_Keep your heart closer to your chest._

 

“Corvo,” says Emily suspiciously, her hands on her hips, her head cocked to the side. “Aren’t you listening to me?”

 

“Oh— yes,” he says, blinking his thoughts away. In her drawing room the morning light is soft, and casts pale yellow over her dubious expression. “Only— I’m not sure I’d be a very good husband.”

 

“There are plenty of noblewomen who would be eager to have your hand.” Almost absentmindedly she begins to waltz though the room _one-two-three,_ turning carelessly through the motions of a dance she has been learning, a little step popular in foreign courts. “Callista says so.”

 

“My hand and my head,” says Corvo, amused, tapping his foot along to her haphazard footwork. “They’d eat me alive, tell Callista that.”

 

She frowns at him, wobbling on her tiptoes, frustration lining the little creases of her forehead. “They’re not all bad. The Paxton sisters are lovely, and they adore you, you know.”

 

He sighs. She’s relentless— perhaps, he admits, another not-so-royal trait inherited from him. “It’s…rather soon for that kind of talk, don’t you think? The plague’s only just been cured.”

 

“But wouldn’t it make you happy?”

 

“Maybe.” He catches her hand in his and corrects her pose, straightens her spine. “Why are you asking, Emily?”

 

Emily tips back her chin, narrows her eyes at him. “Because, Corvo, you’re _not_ happy.”

 

He smiles at her, gently. “I have everything I need right here,” he tells her, and spins her, effortlessly.

 

She twirls. Laughs, dizzy with it.

 

“That,” she says, slowing to hug him tight around the middle, “is such a big, silly lie.”

 

—

  

“Why don’t you marry,” Emily says, and it sticks with him, in his mind.

 

It is the Month of Clans and the chill has begun to fade from the air; soon it will be the Month of Song and the floodwater will swell, and then dissipate in the heat of the sun. With the newfound stability of the crown and the promise of warmer days, the palace is the place of celebration— and Corvo sees more of what Emily had meant, now that he is looking. The tender eyes fixed on him at dinner parties, the quiet whispers and giggles hidden behind silk handkerchiefs and folded fans. The half-veiled offerings of their fathers, brothers.

 

He has never understood the proceedings of courting. With Jessamine, it had been easier; none of these riddled words and coded messages that are so ridiculous to him.

 

Why _doesn’t_ he marry?

 

To wake up to another body’s warmth, to share and relearn a life that has become foreign to him, now— why does it give him pause? What is he holding onto, besides a dying memory of sea-salt and black eyes and a false promise that rings hollow, the sharp edge of anger and hurt that slices through him every time he crosses Corvo’s mind, _build me a shrine—_

 

But give it a few more weeks and he even won’t remember his voice.

 

That is how it’d happened with Jessamine, after all, in the long months of his imprisonment. Her voice had vanished from his mind, first— then the smell of her skin. Then her laughter. Her smile.

 

 _He_ had never smiled.

 

One less thing to lose, Corvo thinks. Just one less thing.

 

—

  

The Overseers have been weakened, certainly, but never defeated, and under the watchful eyes of the Abbey, Corvo has been forced to step more carefully. With a child on the throne— so young, in spite of everything she has endured— they have begun to brew up talk of regency. Their only issue, Corvo knows, will lie in finding a way past her Lord Protector.

 

Proof of continued heresy would prove useful to them, if they wished to act. So he wears gloves, now, to hide the Mark, and keeps his Gifts to himself, which proves to be a lighter burden than he’d expected to carry— his connection to the Void, he has realized, has weakened.

 

Is _still_ weakening, with very passing day.

 

A final taunt. The last strings linking them, cut.

 

The Mark has not faded any, but its magic has. He can’t seem to Blink farther than a few steps, anymore. The familiar humming of the Runes he still finds along the city-shores is quiet, barely discernable.

 

When the Heart’s voice dies out altogether, he seeks out Daud.

 

He catches the Whaler just in time. He is eager to leave Dunwall, to set sail for Serkonos; relearning his past, remapping his future. Time and distance will do them both good, Corvo thinks. Forgiveness and trust had been things he had given freely in the past— perhaps too freely, he admits now. Even in the time that has passed, the discord between them is glaring.

 

“You’re off tomorrow?” Corvo asks, a little stiffly, as they walk the docks together, assassin to assassin, killer to redeemer. The heavy smoke hanging over the harbor has begun to clear a little, now that most of the plague-stricken bodies have been burned, but the acrid flakes of ash still sours the taste in his mouth.

 

“Yes,” replies Daud, just as stiff. “A short passage. We should reach the capital in less than a week, if there isn’t any trouble.”

 

“In that case, I hope the weather holds up for you.”

 

“Thank you,” the Whaler says, and they lapse into an awkward, stilted silence, broken only by the soft rush of the waves, on the rocks below.

 

They’ve both grown unused to formality. It’s been a long time since Corvo has belonged behind palace walls, after all—

 

And the last time Daud had set foot over the threshold, he had left with blood on his hands.

 

Daud clears his throat uncomfortably. “Corvo,” he says, glancing out over the thick, charcoal fog, “mortals can only hold the study of a god for so long.”

 

There is no bitterness in his voice, but Corvo suspects that whatever hostility he had once held against the god had been something as raw as Corvo’s own hurts. “I know.”

 

“He was always going to leave us.”

 

“I know,” Corvo says, again, quieter.

 

There is a strain in the way the older man holds himself, in the jerk of his throat, the hand flinching up to worry, restlessly, at the scar cut through his cheek. “There are eight of us Marked. And there were more, I suspect, before we were even a glint in his eye. He is older than the bones this city was build on— it was inevitable, that he would lose interest.”

 

Corvo does not answer. Daud knows what he would say, all the same.

 

“He’s a creature bound to no law but his own,” he tells him. “You could not have kept him if you’d tried.”

 

“I didn’t want to _keep_ him,” Corvo retorts, sharply, but the flare of anger is brief and rings hollow— it is not Daud he is angry with. “It— it was different,” he adds, not because he believes it, but because he wishes it were true, “with me, he was different.”

 

Daud barks out rough, tense laughter. When Corvo meets his eyes he finds him wavering, caught between self-doubt and a sickened curiosity. “Is that why you spared me? In the hopes that it would catch his attention?”

 

“No,” replies Corvo firmly. “That was a choice of my own volition.”

 

“Sometimes I think it would have been better, if you hadn’t stayed your hand.”

 

“Whatever you think, Daud, I am glad I did.”

 

Daud’s expression twists, muddled in relief and long-clung guilt. For a moment he looks as though he’s going to reach out, clasp his shoulder in some abrupt, wretched form of camaraderie, or thanks— but then he sighs, and shakes his head.

 

You’re a good man, Corvo,” he says, instead. “Do yourself a favor, and forget him, won’t you?”

 

—

 

The ring is simple. Silver and diamond.

 

It will look very pretty, everyone agrees, on Callista’s finger.

 

She is strong-backed and sweet and knows Corvo as a dear friend already. Emily is overjoyed at the pairing of her two closest companions. Piero shakes Corvo’s hand so enthusiastically that Corvo almost doesn’t notice the way his smile slips, afterward.

 

The union will be carried out in autumn, when the stench of death has faded entirely from the city streets. The air will be clean, and the winds will bring the smell of salt down from the coast, and Corvo—

 

Corvo will not think of him. 

 

—

  

(But he still dreams of it— and vividly.)

 

They had dumped his body into the river— Havelock, Pendleton, _Samuel_ — and he had fallen, reeling through the depths of his unconscious mind, into the Void.

 

No one had greeted him there.

 

No sound, but for the unintelligible thrumming of the strange, molded force around him. No smooth voice, no faint smile, no careless turn of phrase. He’d cried out— for him, for anything— and there had been no answer.

 

 _What god?_ the Heart had whispered, trembling in his hand. _What god?_

 

For all of his stubborn will and the three months past, he wakes sweating and shaking and reaching for a body he has never held.  _I will come to you,_ he had said, _build me a shrine—_

And he had.

 

He had disgraced the Lord Regent and reclaimed Emily’s throne and then he’d gone to work on it, dragging the table next to his bed into the pub attic’s back room, yanking the sheets off of the mattress to cover the bare wood-grain. He had not cared if the servants walked in, he had not entertained the thought of slander, he had not even taken the time to lock the door— in his giddy pipe dream the word _heretic_ had lost all meaning, the word _worship_ had been reborn as something else entirely. _Build me a shrine._

Hope has power, more so than fear.

 

He’d lit the lanterns, the few candles he managed to scrape together. He had loosened the whalebone carving hanging around his neck and laid it across the table, he had thought, _this time, he will take it._ He remembers his heart, racing, and the reckless laughter, caught in the back of his throat. He remembers dropping to his knees at the makeshift altar, and waiting, breathlessly.

 

For hours.

 

For what?

Every hiss of the lanterns set his pulse skyrocketing, every creak of the floorboards had been the scuff of his boots, what on earth had he been thinking?

 

Everyone knows gods do not love.

 

He’d beat a slow retreat downstairs, in the end. With the commotion of the Loyalist’s celebration he’d planned on drinking himself into a stupor— but the poison, in any event, had done him in before he’d managed to do it himself. And by the time he had crawled out of the sewers and back to the pub, still shivering and heaving, Havelock’s men had destroyed the shrine— out of superstition, perhaps, or revulsion, more likely.

 

Corvo Attano, the Lord Protector. Corvo Attano, the infidel. Corvo—

 

“ _Corvo—”_

He jolts awake abruptly, his breath coming sharp, his fingers tangled tightly in the cord around his neck and Geoff Curnow standing over him.

 

“Corvo,” says Curnow again, his hand gripping Corvo’s upper arm. In the pitch-dark of his room, Corvo can’t make out the guard captain’s face, but the grave tone of his voice is clear enough. “Sir, I know it’s early, and I apologize for waking you—”

 

“What is’t?” Corvo manages, swiping sleep from his eyes and hoping he sounds more alert than he feels.

 

“We’ve apprehended a man, breaking into the palace— or trying to, at least. He came over the courtyard wall—”

 

“Damn it,” Corvo swings his legs over the side of his bed, searching blindly for his boots. “Get me a lamp, will you, Curnow?”

 

“There’s one here for you, sir.”

 

The whale oil sparks and flares up as Corvo yanks up a rumpled pair of trousers, fumbling groggily with the laces. “Where are you holding him?”

 

“One of the cells, my lord. He was spotted in the pavilion, he’d just come over the wall when we got ahold of him.”

 

Corvo yawns widely, fixing the last of the buttons on his coat. “Good. Wish he would’ve waited ‘till morning at least before he decided to bother us, hmm?”

 

In the eerie blue of the light, Curnow’s expression is grim.

 

“What, it’s— it’s serious?” Corvo asks, blinking a little. “Was he armed?”

 

“There was a small knife on his person, my lord, but that isn’t what concerns me. He—”

 

The guard captain hesitates. Shifts on his feet.

 

“He claims to know you, Corvo,” he says, at last. “He asked for you by name, and— it's strange, that’s all.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, he’s— he’s making most everyone nervous, something in his manner. The servants who’ve seen him are starting to talk, saying he’s trained in witchcraft—”

                                                                                        

“What does he look like?” Corvo demands, his voice echoes off the corridor walls, louder than he means to, it’s stupid, he _knows_ it is, “Tell me, quickly—”

 

“Pale. Er, dark haired, thin— my lord?”

 

Corvo is already halfway to the door before Curnow has stopped speaking.

 

The guard captain calls out after him, bewildered. “Corvo!”

 

“I’ll meet you there!” he shouts over his shoulder, and then he is around the corner, and out of sight, and his right boot is still untied.

 

The cell block has never felt farther away.

 

 _Why are there so many goddamn stairs_ , he thinks, desperately, his heart frantic in his chest, clawing tooth and nail up his throat. He skids around one of the banisters and scares the daylights out of one of the chamber maids in the process— if he could still Blink as fast as he’d been able to a few months ago he would be there in seconds, _no one needs this many stairs—_

_What if it isn’t him?_

It is, it is, it is—

 

_Why now? What does he want?_

 

The Mark, maybe, he’s here to reclaim his Mark, or to claim Corvo’s life, who the hell cares, he _doesn’t—_

_Is this what madness feels like?_

 

He had thought he had been forgotten and nothing can compare to the exhilaration of the thought that he had been wrong, _build me a shrine,_ the Outsider had said,  _I will come to you,_ he had told him _—_

 

He bursts through the prison entrance.

 

The torches flicker, as the door slams shut behind him.

 

The guards snap to attention.

 

Time seems to slow.

 

But then again, Corvo’s always felt that way, when he’s around.

 

The flat stone floors and walls rebound sound and everything is an echo, the water dripping from the pipes lining the ceiling, the low growls of the wolfhounds, Corvo’s heartbeat, hammering in his ears.

 

“Where is he?” he demands, breathlessly, “let me, let me see him—”

 

“Corvo?”

The world reels back into motion at the sound of his name, as he catches sight of the slender body pressing desperately up against the cell bars, long pale fingers white-knuckled around the crosspiece.

 

“Corvo! Demand that they release me, make them let me _go—”_

 

The sailor’s uniform is loose, hanging off his thin frame, white shirt, gray trousers. The tie around his neck is slack and ragged, his black hair unkempt, his mouth downturned, unhappy, his eyes, his eyes are—

                                                                                                                              

His eyes are blue.

 

Corvo’s heart stammers, tightens.

 

And slowly, stone-like, sinks.

 

“Corvo?” he hears, in _his voice,_ “tell them, tell them to—”

 

“Leave us,” Corvo says, quietly.

 

The guards hesitate.

 

“Sir,” one of them speaks up, clearing his throat, “are you sure—”

 

“I’ll handle everything from here,” Corvo presses, turning on him with less patience. “Now, lieutenant, if you don’t mind.”

 

“But sir—”

 

“ _Now,”_ he demands again, when they show no sign of deference. “Get _out,_ tell Curnow he’s not to disturb me, either—”

 

They withdraw, then, quickly and single-file, without further protest.

 

And then they are alone.

 

“Corvo—”

 

“Quiet,” says Corvo, and hates that his voice comes out hoarse. "Please."

 

He moves closer, his eyes adjusting some in the poor light, and studies the face in front of him.

 

It’s identical.

 

The same gauntness.

 

The hair is good, too, the exact same shade of black— only far too long, curling over his ears and at his neck. _“Corvo,”_ snaps the prisoner, his jaw tightening, and _oh,_ the voice is _perfect_ , but—

 

Corvo rubs a tired, weary hand over his face. “It’s the eyes,” he says. “You might’ve fooled me, otherwise. Although truly, he never would have been caught in the first place.”

 

“It’s _me,_ you idiot.”

 

“No,” says Corvo, “but it’s a good enchantment, a real likeness, and I’ll give you that. Who do you work for, who would know about— Campbell and the Lord Regent are as good as dead. Daud wouldn’t have sent you.”

 

The imposter blinks. “Daud is _alive?”_

 

Corvo’s mouth twists grimly. Not one of the Whalers, then. “I was hoping we’d be able to do this civilly. But if you won’t talk, I’m afraid I’ll have to keep you here for quite while longer.”

 

The prisoner’s eyes shutter closed, for a brief moment; when he opens them, they are blazing.

 

“Corvo,” he says, deliberately, as if he is explaining something very difficult to someone very dull, “let me out.”

 

“Or what?” Corvo retorts, without humor, stepping away.

 

He should have expected it.

 

The prisoner’s hand shoots out from behind the bars and suddenly his fingers are tight around Corvo’s collar, and Corvo’s head is slamming into the cell, stars exploding across his vision, he’s seeing white. And feeling the prisoner’s fingers, warm against his skin, find the cord around his neck.

 

“You still wear it,” he hears him exhale, “oh, I knew you would—”

 

“Don’t touch that,” Corvo snarls, a furious, defensive temper rising in him as he struggles against the icy cell bars. “Get your hands off of me, I’ll have you executed—”

 

“But you _won’t,”_ says the prisoner, frustration mixing with a breathless, strange happiness, “you _despise_ bloodshed, you stupid, soft fool—”

 

The whalebone carving slips out from beneath Corvo’s jacket, to rest in his palm.

 

“You never told me,” the prisoner whispers, eyes fixed on Corvo’s. “How _was_ Lady Boyle’s party?”

 

Corvo’s breath catches.

 

The grip on him goes slack and he stumbles back, wide-eyed, catching himself against the wall. “By the Void,” he gasps, his skull throbbing, feeling, all at once, very faint.

 

“Unfortunately,” the Outsider replies. “Didn’t I tell you I’d come?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi everyone!! hope life's been lovely to you <3
> 
> this chapter is a monster. it was 5000 words originally and it took me so. fucking long. D: it's down to about 3500 now, i’ve reworked it five times at least and it’s still not great. i’m a bit ashamed of it tbh but i’ve been sitting on it for so long that i finally just had to let it go ;;;
> 
> i listened to a bunch of bruce springsteen’s hits from the 80’s while writing most of it so that might be why
> 
> hate it, love it, let me know and have a great weekend!!!
> 
> (ps it’s 1am here and i've got morning class so I’m gonna pass out & go through this tomorrow to find any of the typos i missed...my apologies!)
> 
> oH AND. i forgot i usually throw up the [link to my tumblr](http://friend-of-the-abc.tumblr.com), just in case anyone wants to stop in and say hi!! i'm v lonely i have like 2 dishonored friends so pls come by, i really wanna get more into the fandom!


	5. PART V // OPEN BOAT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **EDIT 10/25/2016: went back and did some major editing. nothing plot-related, just changed some formatting + flow that was bothering me**
> 
> i hope everyone's having an amazing day! happy reading, one last chapter after this.

_If I am going to be drowned—_

_If I am going to be drowned—_

_If I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far…?_

_— Stephen Crane_

 

—

 

“I’ve told them you’re from Serkonos,” Corvo says.

 

The door falls closed behind him, and warm bathwater steam curls up at the hinges. From inside the tub the outsider raises his head, pushing sopping wet hair off of his forehead.

 

“This is extraordinary,” he declares— talking, Corvo assumes, about the bath, and not about Corvo’s hasty attempt to cover for him. “I would like to do this every day, I think.”

 

Corvo sighs. “Did you hear what I said?”

 

“Serkonos,” the outsider repeats, carelessly. He rests his chin on the tub rim, child-like. “Why?”

 

“You needed an alias,” Corvo tells him. “You’ll go under the name of Abele, for now, it’s the surname of a royal family I served under.”

 

He hasn’t moved from the doorway, avoids looking at him directly; he hasn’t grown accustomed to it yet, expecting black, seeing blue instead. It sets him at a loss, every time their eyes meet. It’s already disconcerting, having the Outsider—

 

The _outsider,_ he corrects himself, he’s no longer a god. Mortal, _for now,_ he had said, dismissively, but for how long he plans to stay, Corvo doesn’t know. The outsider had, invariably, only given him half the story.

 

And as usual, Corvo has been left to play catch-up.

 

 _Always chasing after you,_ he thinks. Even now, with flesh and blood, skin and bone, running veins and beating heart, _what do you want from me?_

 

“I can’t very well go around telling people I’m sheltering the Leviathan,” he adds, shaking his thoughts from his mind. _Don’t stop to think, you’ll go mad, if you take this thing apart._

 

He can feel the outsider looking at him. The force of the fallen god’s attention centered on him alone: how often had he fantasized about that sort of thing? Little streams of water are dripping from his temple to his chin but he doesn’t seem to notice; Corvo imagines, impulsively, wiping them away with his fingers, running his hands through his hair. Pushing it away from his forehead. Holding his face in his hands—

 

“Let’s,” He clears his throat. “Let’s— let’s keep your identity to ourselves now, all right? I was hard pressed to scrape up a story for you, so it may not be perfect, but you can take on the alias until we’ve returned you to the Void—”

 

The outsider rears back. Water splashes up and over the bath rim, pouring over the tiles beneath its porcelain-clawed feet. “What do you mean, _returned?”_

 

Corvo had thought that joining humanity would make him _easier_ to read, not harder. “That…isn’t what you want?”

 

“What would you know of what I want?” he snarls, upper lip curling, “I’ll stay for as long as I please.”

 

But his voice has shot up an octave, the way Emily’s does when she is startled, or frightened, and his eyes are wide, and uneasy.

 

“I didn’t say you couldn’t,” Corvo says, to console him.

 

The fallen god stares a moment, holds his gaze. Then turns, and settles back into the steaming water instead, his arms tucked tight and sullen across his chest, his knees sticking up pale and bony.  _Sulking,_ Corvo thinks. He would be amused, if he didn’t feel so lost.

 

Why can’t he savor this, while it lasts? He had wanted, so badly, the god to come to him, without having been called. Of his own free will, of his own wants, and desires.

 

But of course, it’s like he’d said— it’s not as if Corvo knows anything of what he wants.

 

And after all, _gods do not._

 

“I dislike your expression,” the outsider declares abruptly, those startlingly blue eyes fixed on him again. “Help me out of this water.”

 

Corvo steps forward, averting his eyes, and holds out his arm. The outsider grips it tightly, fingers digging into his wrist like a lifeline as he clambers to his feet. Even after the time he’d avowedly spent off the Tyvian coast, his movements are still choppy, unpracticed, skittering like a foal on slick ice. Somehow he gets over the tub rim, and Corvo wraps him in a towel, careful not to touch him for too long, or to let his eyes linger. Reaching for another towel, he dries his hair, and is also careful not to notice the way that it sticks up in tufts, soft and unruly as it dries.

 

“I’ve had clothes brought up for you,” he says, once the outsider has stopped shivering, “I’ll send for a valet, they’ll help you dress.”

 

“That’s ridiculous,” the outsider says, sharply, making a face. His nose wrinkles in disgust, and Corvo forgets himself for a moment to marvel at it, the pure expression in his face. “I am not an infant, I can dress myself.”

 

He has _learned_ to dress himself, Corvo interprets, but he lets it go unremarked. “It’s how we do things here,” he tells him, instead. “Most of the Tower will think it very strange, if you refuse.”

 

“Well then,” the outsider says, loftily, reaching for the stool beside the tub where the servants have laid out clean clothes, “I suppose you had better keep it to yourself.”

 

He lets the towel drop from around his shoulders, as he moves to change. _He’s never been taught shame,_ Corvo thinks, heat creeping over his ears. _Or modesty, oh, hell._

 

He is shorter— one of the realizations still dawning on him. Left without the inches he had been accustomed to floating above the ground, he has to tip up his chin, to meet Corvo’s eyes. And his frame is slimmer than Corvo’s— there is muscle, there, too, but so much leaner.

 

In the lingering heat of the bathwater his skin is flushed, petal reds and pinks spread across the thin spans of his chest, the narrow slope of his shoulders. The trousers he’s hitched to his waist are just barely too big, the fabric bunching as he cinches the belt up tight, and the set of his hips would look so good, Corvo thinks, foolishly, beneath his hands. And his neck, if it arched back—

 

They would fit damnably well together.

 

“What are you thinking?” the outsider asks, slipping his shirt over his head, watching Corvo with his kind of clever curiosity.

 

“Nothing,” Corvo says. Too quickly, and the outsider’s mouth curves up.

 

_Keep your heart closer to your chest, damn it._

 

He has always been easy to read. Jessamine had told him as much, when she was still alive, but there was little he could do about it then, and not much else he can do about it now.

 

The outsider, certainly, knows him inside and out. The way he had knelt before him covered in sweat and blood and grime, memorizing the way his mouth moved. Biting his tongue to keep from begging. Wishing the god would tear him apart. He would have preferred it, over that cold, distant indifference.

 

_Would prefer it, still._

 

What he would have given, to know him the way he had known Jessamine. What he’s already given, in trying. It would do him some good, to learn the meaning of _impossibility._

 

“Corvo,” says the outsider, the sharp smile gone, and Corvo knows that it’s just something else, plain on his face.

 

Too easy to read. Too forgiving, too trusting, too readily left behind.

 

 _What are you here for?_ he wants to ask. _I waited,_ he wants to say—

 

But that isn’t quite true.

 

The engagement band weighs heavy on his finger. Maybe he had been the kind of man who put faith in hope, before. Now, he thinks, he’s the kind of man who won’t make the same mistake twice.

 

“What is it?” the outsider asks, reaching up like he is going to touch him, and for a maddening half-second, Corvo thinks he sees something, a flicker, behind his eyes, open, soft sentiment, sudden doubt—

 

The door swings open behind him; a cold shock of hallway air hits the nape of his neck. Immediately he fumbles backward, putting a good two feet of empty space between the outsider and himself.

 

“Corvo!”

 

Emily’s face is bright and shining, she bounces up to his elbow, tugging at his sleeve.

 

“Callista says we’re to go boating today,” she says, breathless with the excitement, wriggling up to his side until he lifts his arm, and settles it around her shoulders. “I’ve finished all my studies, I promise, will you come?”

 

Her eagerness is infectious. Corvo smiles a little. “Boating?”

 

“On Samuel’s new schooner! We can fish, and look for whales,” she adds, “please say you’ll go.”

 

He glances over at the outsider; his face is set tight, little creases drawn around his eyes. “I don’t know if I should leave our guest behind,” he tells Emily, brushing back her hair. “Who knows what kind of trouble he’d get into, without me.”

 

“Oh!” Emily wriggles out of Corvo’s grip, bounding up to the outsider and grasping his pale, blue-veined hands in her own small ones. “You’ll come too, won’t you?”

 

The outsider’s mouth is sullen, lips pressed into a rigid line. “If I must,” he mutters, staring over the Empress’s head at the wall opposite.  

 

“Yes, you must,” replies Emily happily, releasing him. “We’ll leave as soon as you come down!”

 

Just like that she is gone, whirling out of the bath with the kind of youthful, careless joy Corvo has so dearly missed in her. The outsider watches her leave with a mixture of confusion and something darker, scathing. “She’s a handful,” Corvo says, to fill his silence. “I’m— sorry about this, but she’ll insist. We’ll just have to bear through it.”

 

“You should not let her order you about,” the outsider says, adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves with a hard look in his eye.

 

“She deserves her share of comfort,” Corvo replies. “After all she’s been through— it’s the least I can do.”

 

The outsider turns sharply, and sits on the tub rim, yanking up his boots. “I would have Marked her,” he says, savagely, jerking too hard at the laces, gritting his teeth when the hasty knots come undone in his hands. “So many of her tomorrows had the potential of bloodshed, of _chaos—_ ”

 

He looks up at Corvo like he expects the declaration to cut him. To provoke something. And maybe Corvo would be angry, if it was not so obviously intended to hurt. If it was not so clearly born out of hurt, itself.

 

He kneels, instead, and takes the outsider’s boots in his hands, one at a time.

 

“Knot the lace here,” he murmurs, looping them together, pulling, tugging them tight. “Thread it through, like this.”

 

“I know,” says the outsider, stiffly, quietly.

 

But he doesn’t move to push Corvo back.

 

And when Corvo looks up at him, it is his gaze that shies away.

 

—

 

The last of Dunwall’s snow and sleet has melted away in the Month of Song’s spring swell, and as a result, the waters in the bay are high, and refreshingly cold. It is one of his favorite times of year, the chill in the air receding just enough to become a faint memory in the back of the mind, the sun putting all thoughts of winter to bed, beneath flower-scattered trees and warm-stoned streets.

 

Summer storms, of course, are almost impossible to rival. But the skies are clear, today, and there is little else Corvo considers better.  

 

Emily waits until they are past the palace walls before she snatches up Corvo’s hand in her own, her fingers tight around his wrist. She tugs him joyfully through the gardens, down the rocky paths to the docks, where Callista and Samuel are already waiting. The outsider follows behind, stubbornly refusing to match their pace with his bow-legged, graceless gait.

 

The fallen god’s mood grows only more sour when they reach the schooner. Samuel greets Corvo with a fond clasp of the shoulder, introducing him to the few crewmembers along for the day, and Callista smiles, chatting about a few visiting ambassadors Corvo had missed over breakfast. She takes his arm in hers and from the corner of his eye, Corvo sees the outsider turn away, grimacing at the pier underfoot as if it has somehow done him wrong.

 

But once they are on the boat and heading out toward open waters, the shore shrinking behind them, the weight wearing him down seems to lift, gradually, bit by bit.

 

The water glints diamond-like, pale blues and greens. The boat cuts cleanly through the lull of the waves. Around them Samuel and his crew work, steadying riggings, letting out the sail; beside him, the outsider stares out over the water, the wind pushing cool fingers through his hair.

 

“Are you glad you came?” Corvo asks, watching his profile, and the way his eyes fall closed, briefly, against the breeze.

 

“Yes.” He leans against the railing, into the faint ocean spray. “It is…good. To be on the water again.”

 

He has not spoken much, yet, of the whaling ship, and Corvo presses hesitantly at the subject, the questions burning in his mind getting the better of him. “You enjoyed your time with the sailors, then.”

 

“Enjoyed—” the outsider pauses. “I suppose. Sailors are not so foreign, to me. I have watched them for much longer than I have watched your people.”

 

“My people?”

 

His mouth twists; he waves a scornful hand at Callista, and Emily. “Your— _politics_. Your kingdoms, your courts.”

 

Corvo hides his smile behind his hand. “Less interesting?”

 

“Predictable,” the outsider says, haughtily. “Those who have power are afraid to lose it, those who are deprived power wish to take it. You would tire of the cycle too, if you lived as long as I have.”

 

He casts his gaze down, then, toward the waves, swirling beneath the schooner hull.

 

“Sailors pay no mind to who is on the throne. They live simply, but they are not simple minded. They feel deeply, the things that matter—” He cuts himself off, looking frustrated. “That is,” he says, searching for the right words, “on the trawler I sailed with—”

 

“Trawler?”

 

Emily’s head pops up from the other side of the boat, where Callista is helping her wind a worm around her hook.

 

“You sailed on a whaling ship?” she asks.

 

“Oh, here we go,” Corvo warns him, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, “say _no—”_

 

“Yes,” replies the outsider, bemused, and her face lights up like the sun.

 

She is at his side at an instant, wedging herself between Corvo’s thigh and the outsider’s hip to grab at his arm, “What was it like?”

 

“It was— cold. There were many storms.” Her mouth makes a little round _o,_  eyes going wide; he looks toward Corvo for help and finds him stifling laughter against the back of his hand. “I was not with them for long.”

 

“Did you see a hurricane?” Emily asks, delighted all the same, “did you ever get knocked overboard?”

 

“I was overboard, but only once—”

 

“Were you rescued?”

 

“Obviously,” he says, scowling.

 

“Ah!” She claps her hands together. “Did you get to steer the ship? And fill up the oil, and plot the maps?”

 

“They taught me only the basics. The other sailors did the rest.”

 

“What about the harpoons, and the crane— oh, did you see the whales? Are their teeth really as sharp as everyone says? Did they try to swallow up the sailors, and sink your boat?”

 

“The whales—” begins the outsider.

 

And then stops, looking sick.

 

He turns, wrenching away from Emily, digging his fingers into the railing.

 

“I didn’t see any,” he says at last.

 

“In all three months?” Emily frowns. “Not one?”

 

“No.”

 

“But—”

 

“Emily,” says Corvo.

 

His laughter is gone. The outsider’s eyes are closed, his grip on the rail knuckle-white.

 

“Can you help Samuel cast out his line?” Corvo asks, firmly enough that she knows it is not really a question.

 

“Samuel doesn’t need my help,” Emily replies. But she bites at her lip, when her eyes turn toward the outsider again, and she presses her little hand to his in her own way of apology, before scampering away again.

 

Next to him the outsider has opened his eyes. His fingers are splayed at the hollow of his neck, pressing lightly there, like he is holding something in, or coaxing it out— like he is drowning. It makes him falter.  _She’s a handful,_ he thinks about saying, again, to break him from the reverie. Or, _what were you going to say, about the trawler?_

 

_What do you want from me?_

 

_What are you here for?_

 

“I can ask Samuel to turn back,” is what he settles on, in the end.

 

“Why?” the outsider says, startling. His hand is still resting at his throat.

 

“If you’re not feeling well—”

 

“It’s nothing. It just— it hurts. To breathe, sometimes.”

 

On the other side of the schooner, Samuel has his hand on Emily’s back, chuckling guidance as she shrieks, struggling to reel in a catch. The lapping of the waves and their mingling laughter hangs in the air and white-winged gulls dip and soar between the sails, and the outsider tips his head back, and settles his gaze skyward.

 

"Do you know what it is like,” he asks, sounding distant, “to feel the weight of the world, all at once? To feel the entirety of— of everything, without warning?”

 

Corvo thinks of Jessamine's bloody body, on the pavilion tiles. Of Emily crying out for him, the Whaler's gloved hands dragging her backwards. He thinks of the hot-iron in the prison, the matted-over scar at his temple. The gates of the Void opening for him, for the first time; wearing the Mark, like a treasure.

 

Of realizing that he is waiting at a shrine that no one will ever come to.

 

Of seeing blue eyes, instead of black.

 

"I suppose not," he answers, finally, and the outsider looks back out over the ocean with the expression of someone who knows that he should be satisfied, and still, is not.

 

In his room that night Corvo sits with his head in his hands. Hears _gods do not_ and _do you know what it is like_ echo together in his head _._

 

The taste of hope is faint and sickly sweet in his mouth. Hadn’t he said he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice?

 

_He was always going to leave us._

 

Immortality, incarnate. Timelessness playing with mortality, the way children play with fire.

 

_So let him. Humor him, let him have his play-pretend— a few days as a human, what harm could come of it?_

 

_He will tire of you, either way._

 

He doesn’t call for a valet. Doesn’t want anyone’s hands on him, unless they are cold and pale and thoughtlessly, unknowingly cruel. He crawls into bed without undressing, exhausted, it takes so much out of him, the pretending, he remembers—

 

Remembers Jessamine, and only touching her in the dark, behind locked doors.

 

He could whisper all the tender nothings in the world into her ear, love her honest and open, but when the moon sunk beneath the horizon, the illusion of safety went with it. And in court the next day he would take his place in the shadows and watch, silently, as foreign suitors laid their gifts at her feet _._

 

 _It’s only formality,_ she would tell him, later, when they were alone again, _oh, Corvo, you must keep your heart closer to your chest—_

 

In his dream—

 

_Is he dreaming?_

 

The Void without its keeper is colorless, shapeless, it flickers, and becomes the the balcony outside of Jessamine’s old room. There is blood between her lips, as she stands at the edge of the bannister: on her fingers, dripping from the cavern in her chest.

 

 _He came over the wall,_ she says, like she is telling him a fairytale, stroking his hair when he moves to stand beside her. _Asked for you by name, and still, you have not asked why he is here._

 

The blood coating her hands is in his hair, now. _He’ll be gone soon, anyway,_ he says. _What does it matter, he’ll lose interest, he always does._

 

_Are you afraid of the answer he’ll give you? That he hasn’t come for you?_

 

Her blood runs down his temple. She pulls her hands away, looking sad.

 

 _What is it like?_ she asks. _Loving him?_

 

 _Like loving a ghost,_ he answers. _Like you, like the way I loved you—_

 

Only it is not her, anymore, with ashen skin and oil black hair, and an impassiveness that burns.

 

 _I know,_ Corvo wants to tell him, _i_ _t’s all right. You are deathless, and heartless, and you don’t understand, how could you?_

 

But the outsider is reaching for him, all the same.

 

 _Take my voice,_ Corvo tries to say, frantic now, _take my eyes, take my Heart the way you took hers but please, don’t tell me why you came, not unless you’ve come for me—_

 

_Not unless you’ve come for—_

 

Waking up is like a bucket of cold water to the face.

 

Reality takes hold of his hand and yanks him, hard, back into the conscious world, where a soft-haired head is pressed to his shoulder, and a brittle, shaking frame is hunched at the side of his bed. “This’s the second time in a week I’ve been woken like this,” Corvo says, his words sounding half-slurred and groggy to his own ears as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “Think I should start double-locking my door.”

 

The outsider—

 

 _Shit, yes, it’s him, blue eyes_ —

 

He pulls back a little, hiccuping, and mops his nose on his sleeve.

 

“Oh,” says Corvo, stunned, softer. The outsider is still pressed close enough that he can feel his tears, hot and wet, through the cotton of his shirt. “You— was it a nightmare?”

 

He nods, hands clenching and unclenching in the bed sheets, and Corvo throws back the covers.

 

“Emily has them,” he says, scooting up to settle his feet on the floor. “Bad dreams.”

 

“And you?” the outsider asks, quietly. “You have them, too?”

 

“And me,” Corvo admits. “Part of being human, I suppose.”

 

The outsider exhales shakily, his hand flying up to clutch at the hollow of his throat. _It hurts to breathe, sometimes._ The ghost of whatever is haunting him clings to the pulse in his neck, and Corvo has to fight the urge to pull his hand away, to link their fingers together, and kiss his knuckles until he’s stopped trembling.

 

“What’re you in here for?” Corvo asks, _be gentle, with him._

 

“I don’t know,” the outsider says, sounding pained. Tears are still dripping to his chin and Corvo pushes himself to his feet, rummaging around in his bedside table for a handkerchief. “I needed— to see you.”

 

“To see me?” Corvo echoes. He sits the outsider down on the edge of the mattress and shakes out the cloth, wiping gently at his cheeks, his nose, the way he does with Emily. Goes slowly, drying the tired, bruised skin beneath his eyelids.

 

“I’m, I was— I thought for a moment that—”

 

His eyes shutter shut and fresh new tears leak out from the corners; Corvo stops them with the pad of his thumb. “Want to tell me?”

 

He shakes his head.

 

“It helps, to talk.”

 

“No. No.”

 

“I can walk you back to your rooms, if—”

 

“I’m staying," he says, meant to be a command, maybe. But the way it comes out is frightened. "Let me stay," he says, when Corvo gives no reply, curling in toward him with his forehead against Corvo’s chest and his fingers gripping blindly in the folds of his shirt, “Corvo—”

 

“All right,” Corvo murmurs. “Here, okay, you’re all right.”

 

And it is all too easy, after that.

 

He settles him under the quilts on the other side of the bed; his palm finds the small of the outsider’s back as he turns in toward him, and sweeps up his spine and back down again in slow, soothing strokes. He’ll carry him back to his room when he’s fallen asleep again. He’ll only let him stay until—

 

The outsider sighs, easing at Corvo’s touch, his eyes drooping shut. In the dark his eyelashes are just smudges, the lines of his mouth faint.

 

“I’ll be married in autumn,” Corvo says, into the blackness.

 

He doesn’t know why.

 

To remind himself. To counter _—_ this, whatever this is.

 

“Don't,” the outsider mumbles, his voice drowsy and slow, turning to press his face against Corvo’s chest.

 

A minute later his breathing goes even, and Corvo knows he’s asleep.

 

The room is dark, and warm, and safe.

 

_I’ll only let him stay until—_

 

He closes his eyes.

 

_Just for a little while._

 

And he falls asleep there, his arms around a fallen god, and the fallen god’s head beneath his chin.

 

—

 

They had never been—

 

 _Close_ is the wrong word.

 

Perhaps that's part of it, that he can not even give a name to what they had been, much less what they are now. _Friends_ is laughable. _Allies_ is cold.

 

Introducing him to Emily’s entourage, even by his alias, is impossible. _This is him,_ he begins, every time, _my—_

 

And then, nothing. Hollow, dead air where designation should be.

 

Sometimes, Corvo thinks, as the days pass, he is little more than a stranger. A stranger he knows too well, his hand at the hollow of his throat, eyes closed against it. _My god,_ he might have said, once. _This is him, my stranger—_

 

"Stop staring at him," Emily hisses, elbowing him in the side.

 

“I’m not,” he says, automatically, jolting a little and blinking, fast.

 

"Yes you are, you have been all day, it’s _rude,_ Corvo.”

 

The young Empress has learned to love him all too easily _—_ partly, Corvo imagines, upon finding that he is even more apt to dismiss manners and etiquette than she is. She has already presented him with quite a few drawings, lovingly done, and while the outsider had seemed, in all accounts, disdainful in the face of her gifts _—_

 

“Better than Sokolov,” Corvo had heard him mutter, and he had tucked them away in his jacket.

 

He begins to learn the pattern of the outsider’s moods. The inner workings of the fallen god’s constant push and pull against emotion. The way he will frown and sulk, if Corvo attempts to lend a hand in something he wants, desperately, to learn to do himself. How he goes pink at the ears, when Corvo challenges him, or pushes back. He grows unhappy stuck within the walls of the Tower, and so Corvo finds things to keep him busy, scraping up whatever distractions come their way. He takes him to see a traveling troupe, once, and hears him laugh, awkward and rough and loud, for the first time. They visit one of the new markets in the old Flooded District, and peruse for hours through the meaningless trinkets.

 

Stupid, soft things.

 

They bid each other goodnight every evening, at the top of the Tower stairs, before going their separate ways, to their respective rooms.

 

But every evening, without fail, Corvo startles awake to find the outsider crawling into his bed, draping his cold feet over Corvo’s, pressing up next to him, shivering uncontrollably. It is only the dreams, of course, that spur him there. Night terrors, ripping him so suddenly from sleep that the only way he can find it again is at Corvo’s side. The Lord Protector is his circumstantial comfort. A warm body, something solid to hold onto, nothing more.

 

The outsider will lose interest in it soon enough. Not just in Corvo, but in the human realm itself. _Mortal,_ he had said, _for now_. Whether he is a god or not—

 

Hadn’t Corvo sworn to himself that—

 

Every morning he wakes up next to him, relief pulls him under like a riptide, _still here, he's still here, thank the Void, thank you—_

 

And then, to himself, a reminder:

 

_Savor this._

 

Mortals can only hold the study of a god for so long.

 

And Corvo will never see him again, once he is gone.

 

Of that, he is certain.

 

—

 

Callista is the first to suggest the trip to the peninsula. In the muggy heat of the thick-walled Tower, any excuse to be outdoors comes with a flood of overwhelming relief. The picnic they plan haphazardly along the way is simple enough to manage: brightly colored fabric sheets laid across the tip of the rocky beach, wicker baskets, topped with fruit. The afternoon is something dream-like, Emily screaming laughter, Samuel catching her in his arms, Callista, scattering bread crumbs and oranges to the gulls and pretending she doesn’t see Corvo out of the corner of her eye, sneaking some of the fruit for himself.

 

The stones at the edge of the peninsula shore are smooth and blue by late afternoon; he finds the outsider there, quiet and broken from the group, watching as the sun begins to sink beneath the glass of the ocean waves. He turns as Corvo draws near, his hands in his pockets, unreadable.

 

“It’s a good view,” Corvo says as way of greeting, looking out over the water. “Best in the city.”

 

“Yes,” says the outsider, softly, shifting his weight. “It’s easy,” he admits, “to pretend that I can hear whalesong, here.”  

 

“Do you miss the Void?”

 

He hadn't meant to ask; he bites his tongue, after it slips out. The outsider sighs, his eyes still trained seaward. “Sometimes,” he says.

 

“I expect you’ll be leaving, soon, then,” Corvo says, hoping that his voice is steadier than he feels, and when the outsider looks at him, the vulnerability there feels like a blade to the gut.

 

“What if—” the outsider says.

 

Then looks away, again.

 

“What if I—”

 

He swallows, and Corvo can see it, the jerk of his throat.

 

“Nevermind,” he says.

 

They walk along the blue-stoned shore together, as the sea swallows up the sun, and spills yellows and pinks across the skyline. The outsider folds up his pant legs to his knees as the last rays of sunlight hit the beach, and wades down into the surf, picking through shells, tossing them up onto the rocky sand.

 

By the time they stumble across the cavern, the last of the light is a sliver above the horizon.

 

It is tucked away along a cluster of boulders, well-protected from the storms that rock the headland, and just small enough to be overlooked. The overhang is low, and Corvo ducks down to clamber in past the waves, lapping up at the entrance—

 

He sees, immediately, purple.

 

 _“No,”_ he blurts, half-laughing out loud in surprise at the happy accident; beside him, the outsider is staring, eyes wide, astonished.

 

The shrine is beautiful. The altar is a work of artistry, curved, polished driftwood stacked waist-high; the drapes are wind-blown and ragged but still hold the rich, dark mulberry hue that Corvo knows so well. Low-wicked candles and oil-less lanterns are scattered over the damp, stone floor. The rush and drip of water echoes, surrounds, encases them.

 

“Like the belly of a whale,” Corvo says. His voice reverberates, and bounces off of the cavern walls.

 

The outsider moves deliberately through the shrine. Running his hands over the deep violet fabrics, the wooden grain of the altar. He steps softly, carefully, like he is on hallowed ground— in a strange respect, Corvo thinks, he is. His own peculiar sanctuary, someone else’s place of prayer.

 

“Do you think they know?” Corvo asks. “The people who worship you, can they tell that you’ve left the Void?”

 

The outsider shrugs, running a finger over the inked words that have been painted over the stone around them. “I am not sure. I never answered any of them, not the way that I answered you.”

 

He stiffens, then, abruptly.

 

“That night,” he says, slowly, dismay dawning in his voice. “At the pub—”

 

Corvo wishes that the lanterns were lit, that it might be easier to see his face.

 

“Did you build me a shrine?”

 

There is no sense in lying, about this. “Yes.”

 

"How—" The outsider makes a noise, low, in his throat. “How long did you wait?”

 

Corvo’s chest is tight. The sound of the waves flowing in at the mouth of the cavern are distant, as if miles away from where they stand. His voice seems rough, to his own ears. “For— hours.”

 

The outsider is quiet, for so long that Corvo wonders if he’s heard him.

 

“It’s all right,” Corvo says, to break the silence. “I’m not…I don’t blame you, for anything.”

 

“Corvo,” replies the outsider, tired, like he knows he is lying.

 

“You’re here now,” Corvo says, determined to convince him that he is not.

 

There is an exhale, a soft rush of breath, and the outsider moves toward him. The sharp lines of his face are softened, in what is left of the fast-fading light. Even-tide paints dusky shadows over his cheeks. His eyes are clear, creased at the corners.

 

He tips his head up, a breath away.

 

He reaches up to Corvo’s neck, and takes the whalebone carving in his hands.

 

Running his fingers over it, the way he had done all those months ago— head dipped, hands careful, and focused. Like it is an enigma. Something cryptic, somehow, even though Corvo has always bared his heart openly. In his hands, on his sleeve.

 

The outsider looks up at him. “You wear it for me.”

 

“It was supposed to be yours,” Corvo says, smiling with a humor he does not quite feel. “You know that.”

 

The outsider drops his gaze, his face drawn.

 

“If I had taken it,” he says, cupping Corvo’s hand in his, his fingers sliding along the back of his palm and resting at the smooth, silver band of the ring. “Would you still be wearing this?”

 

“No,” Corvo says. “Never.”

 

 _Tell me,_ he begs, then, silently. _Tell me you came here for me._

 

_Tell me not to marry her, tell me and I won’t—_

 

_Tell me you’re staying._

 

_Say, I’m staying, I want to stay._

 

“I'm sorry,” the outsider says, and for a heart-stopping half-second, Corvo thinks that somehow, he’s heard him, that somehow, he’s answering.

 

But then he begins to talk.

 

Low, at first.

 

Louder, gradually.

 

It pours out of him uncapped, like Corvo has unwittingly yanked the stopper from a drain. And once he starts, he doesn’t seem to know how to stop— all of the truths, that he had kept to himself.

 

He had to remind himself to breathe, for two weeks after leaving the Void.

 

He still forgets to, every once in awhile.

 

The ship captain had called him _son,_ had put his arm around his shoulders.

 

The first person to really, truly touch him for 4000 years, and he remembers—

 

He’d flinched away, he’d been ungrateful—

 

_He’d wished it had been Corvo—_

 

He dreams of dying. That, and storm winds, and the whispers of the Void, a language once so familiar now something entirely alien. It speaks to him and for the first time, he cannot understand, _b_ _ut the whispers feel like warnings._

 

The trawler had hung whales from hooks.

 

They had looked at him, still alive, with the saddest eyes he had ever seen, and he had vomited over the side of the ship as they had bled out blue and black and the sailors had laughed, and joked, and he had learned a different kind of pain.

 

_His hand at his throat_ _—_

 

It hurts to breathe but sometimes, when Corvo is near to him, he forgets to, altogether.

 

Corvo reaches for him without thinking. Rests his fingers against the outsider's jaw. Cradles his cheek in his palm, exhales, soft, "Why did you come," he whispers, and the outsider looks at him, eyes black again, in the cavern shadows. 

 

Then he leans forward, and closes the gap between them.

 

There is a hushed, frozen moment. In which Corvo thinks, despite everything, he will suddenly be beat back. Put in his place,  _gods do not love—_

 

But then the moment is over, and the outsider's hands reach up, and fix in Corvo’s collar.

 

His lips do not taste of salt, or brine. They are wretchedly, utterly human. And warm. Warm and wet, and unmoving against Corvo’s, parted a little— _he doesn’t know what to do,_ Corvo realizes. _Doesn’t know how._

 

He pulls away. The outsider blinks, accusing, already short-winded, out of breath.

 

Corvo's thumb traces his temple. "You're afraid."

 

“I'm— fine.”

 

“You’re shaking.”

 

“I’m fine,” the outsider snaps again, with more of his old temper, reaching for Corvo, bringing their foreheads together, breathing out, against his mouth. “I just, it's only, when you look at me—"

 

_It hurts, it hurts to breathe—_

 

“The only thing that is worse,” he says. “Is when you are looking at someone else.”

 

—

 

Back at the Tower, they say their goodnights.

 

Go their separate ways.

 

But it’s different, they both feel that it is.

 

ANd when the outsider slips into his room, tonight, Corvo is waiting. Standing at the mantle, pacing. Heart thudding hard and heavy in his chest, the outsider comes close, unspeaking, and  _hope has power, more so than fear—_

  

He kisses frantically, in the secrecy of Corvo's room. 

 

More than a little clumsy. His lips move messily, his nose bumping against Corvo’s, his fingers gripping and tugging at the folds of his shirt. Corvo tries to angle them better, tilting his head a little, but the outsider mimics him and their foreheads collide.

 

He flinches back, hissing and hard-eyed, leans in again, frustration flashing across his face—

 

Corvo puts his hands on his shoulders, holds him back.

 

“Let me,” he says, when the outsider flushes, mouth half-open in protest. “It’s all right, let me lead.”

 

It is sweet, and sloppy, with Corvo’s fingers gentle around his neck, and the outsider’s mouth soft against his own. But oh, it’s good, wavering slowly in and out of sync, learning the pace and measure. Every so often he feels the outsider beginning to press forward, sure-footed— and then Corvo teaches him something new. Winds a hand into his hair, licks into his mouth. Slips a thigh between his legs.

 

And he falls apart in Corvo’s hands, shivering, gasping, relearning everything all over again—

 

They don’t make it to the bed.

 

The closest they get is the wall opposite.

 

Corvo presses into him there and that pressure, his solid weight, is good, so good; when Corvo rolls his hips the fabric between them sings sweet, rough friction, and he cannot stop kissing him, still cupping his face with one hand, the other holding him in place. He’s trembling, the outsider—

 

If he wasn’t keeping him upright, Corvo thinks, his legs would give out.

 

And yet, true to his nature—

 

“Sexual indulgence has— has always seemed a petty thing,” he manages to stammer out, as Corvo mouths at his ear. “Why should you spend your time pleasuring me when— _ah_ , that is nice— when you could simply provide yourself with, with the same pleasure?”

 

“I suppose I could,” Corvo replies, lowly, from where he’s moved to lick at the outsider’s throat, “but only if you’d be willing to watch.”

 

The outsider blinks. “How would that possibly provide _me_ with any kind of stimulation?”

 

Corvo lets out a groan that melts, too quickly, into a laugh, “Because, it would be— you would enjoy— never mind! We can have this conversation later—”

 

“Yes, well,” he replies, _smugly,_ Corvo thinks, stifling another laugh, “I am, perhaps, more educated in the ways of human pleasure than you think.” His voice pitches up a bit as Corvo bites down, his hips twitching against Corvo’s thigh as Corvo’s teeth scrape his collarbone but _still,_ “I do not fully understand its purpose, of course, it seems a somewhat superfluous act when not instigated with the intent of conception. In my opinion,” the outsider decides, entirely breathless as Corvo drops to his knees before him, unlaces his breeches, yanks his trousers to his ankles, “it can hardly be as enjoyable as—”

 

Corvo puts his mouth around his cock, and his words fail.

 

“Oh,” he says. Then, wide-eyed and high-pitched, _“oh,_ Corvo, Corvo—”

 

Corvo runs his hands up and down the his thighs, the motion repetitive, soothing. After a few long, quaking moments the outsider’s head falls back against the wall, whimpering, and Corvo readjusts. Raises his eyes to watch the soundless movement of his lips, the way his fingers scrabble, wildly, seeking purchase in the wooden panels of the wall behind him. He mouths at the head of his cock and his whole body jerks, incapably, a small, disbelieving sound breaking from the back of his throat.

 

When Corvo sinks down, deeper, every muscle in his body seems to go taut.

 

But still, he does not talk, as Corvo’s cheeks hollow, as he sucks, hard, and licks around him, he does not _touch—_ like he does not know if he is supposed to.

 

Allowed to.

 

Corvo lets his cock slip free from his mouth; the outsider makes an immediate, wounded noise.

 

“Why— why are you stopping—”

 

“Here,” he says, very gently. He catches the outsider’s wrists in his hands, and settles them in his hair. "All right?"

 

“Huh— I— all right.” The outsider’s fingertips graze against his skull, his grip uncertain, and Corvo looks up at him, his palms steady on his hips. His voice, even as soft as he can make it, is hoarse and wrecked already, _hell, it’s been a long time._

 

“Is it good?”

 

The outsider shudders, his cheeks flushing slowly; he blinks, rapidly, and looks away. “Uh. Uh-huh.”

 

“Tell me,” Corvo says, sliding his palm up between his legs to slick roughly against him, and the outsider groans, quietly, his hands tightening desperately in Corvo’s hair. Corvo strokes him painfully slow, his grip loose enough to tease, his thumb rubbing at the wet, slickened tip, “How it feels.”

 

The color in the outsider's face spreads from his face to his neck to the tips of his ears, pale skin flushing a beautiful, filthy red. Corvo is half-hard in his pants simply from watching, from hearing him, mouth half-open, just stammers of phrases, fragments. “I, I don’t—”

 

Corvo curls his fingers back between his thighs, where the muscle is tight, and receives a startled, reedy cry in return. It coils white-hot in his belly, cock twitching, swallowing back half-formed moans himself; the outsider’s head falls back again, his body sagging against the wall. “I, _ah,_ I don’t, Corvo, I don’t know, please—”

 

He takes him into his mouth a second time. Hums around him, working his hand at the base until he hears his moans break, fall into pieces, fall into words. His hands tug and twist haphazardly in Corvo’s hair, his fingers clinging tightly now, to the dark, messy tangles. A shudder ripples up his spine, fingers yanking up, hard, in oblivious warning; Corvo pulls away before he can finish, kissing softly between his thighs.

 

After a moment he stands, running his hands up beneath his shirt and around his sides, to the small of his back. The outsider is boneless, against the wall, clay in his hands, “Come here—”

 

He had meant to walk him back, toward the bed, but they get only a few steps before the outsider trips, his feet still tangled in his trousers. A surprised, dazed noise bursts out of him as he clutches at Corvo to keep from falling, and Corvo laughs, feeling giddy, a little lightheaded, holding the outsider to his chest, his whole body hot and thrumming.

 

“Off,” huffs the outsider, trusting Corvo to hold him steady as he kicks his boots away, and his trousers, then nudges his arms up, over his head, to strip him out of his shirt. Corvo begins to trace along his ribs, up toward the center of his chest, where his breath rises, and falls, but the outsider catches his wrist in his hand, and stops him.

 

And takes hold of his shirt, uncertainly, like a question.

 

Corvo hesitates.

 

Caught off guard.

 

It has been over a year, since he has been bare-skinned in front of anybody. He guides the outsider to the edge of the mattress. Sits him down, steps back.

 

It is strange, the process. Going through the motions. The weight of it hits him suddenly, like he is repeating a fading memory, replaying an old audiograph; he begins with his boots, unlacing the careful knots, and his fingers are clumsy, suddenly. Nervous.

 

He drops his shirt, next, at his feet.

 

Steps out of his trousers.

 

The outsider is still watching him, quietly, from the bed, and he swallows, a little.

 

The weight pressing back his cock vanishes, as he eases his smallclothes down.

 

He steps up to the bed, in between the outsider’s open knees. A year, since he has been bare-skinned in front of someone, but even longer, since he has felt this exposed. The outsider looks up at him, blue eyes dark—

 

And he touches him. His chest, first, the carving, briefly. Then the invisible lines of his muscles, beneath. He pushes his fingers up to his collarbone, to his throat; he touches Corvo’s face, drags the pad of his thumb over his chin, his lips, the crease between his nose and mouth.

 

His hands are rough, rougher than Corvo had expected. _Those months on the trawler,_ he thinks. There are calluses thick over his palms, lining his fingertips.

 

He finds his ribs, his hips, the bones beneath the skin. The hair dusting his chest, his belly, curling thicker at his groin.

 

The shape of him.

 

Corvo stiffens, his breath catching.

 

The outsider strokes him carefully, curious, and Corvo makes a soft, helpless sound, an exhale, a _yes;_ he is still dizzyingly hard, the feel of his hands on him is enough. The grip around his cock is surer, now, the outsider growing bold as Corvo arches a little into him, his body curling in toward him, his head dropping against the outsider’s shoulder.

 

He feels, through a haze, the outsider’s other hand, pressing up against his chest.

 

“I can feel your heart,” the outsider says, breath warm against his ear.

 

“C—can you?”

 

“I didn’t know it could beat so hard.” He splays his fingers out thoughtfully, over his chest. The hand around Corvo’s cock quickens its pace, and Corvo bites down on his lip, hard, a moan rippling through him. “Like it is trying to get out.”

 

“Oh, no,” Corvo says, turning his head to mouth at the outsider’s jaw, “I hope it doesn’t.”

 

He hears the outsider exhale, crossly— but he doesn’t take either hand away, and Corvo shudders into the crook of his neck, the solid friction of his palm just enough, and not enough, all at once.

 

“Laugh at me all you’d like,” the outsider says. “I would remind you that the first few days after you received my Gifts, you were little more than a clumsy child.”

 

“I always wondered if you’d seen any of that,” Corvo says, panting. He feels delirious, with the need to come. He pushes the outsider back onto the mattress without warning, follows him down, straddles him, their hips aligned. When he rocks forward their cocks slick together, and the outsider's hands fly up to grip at his upper arms.

 

Corvo rocks against him again, kissing him with his hands on his neck, his thumbs pressed beneath his jaw. The outsider smiles, wildly, against his lips.

 

“Stumbling through Blinks,” he gasps, between kisses, half-swallowed sounds collecting in the back of his throat. “Almost— almost falling off rooftops.”

 

“All the same,” Corvo says, kissing his temple, his hair. “You wouldn’t have let me fall.”

 

Something flickers, in the outsider’s expression. Something real, and doubtless, and almost shocked, and Corvo has never been so glad to be right. To read it in his face— _it’s true, he wouldn’t have_ —

 

_Did he even know?_

 

He touches his cheek. To wipe away the stunned, frozen look in his eyes.

 

But then the outsider is curving up to press against him again, his face hidden against Corvo’s shoulder. Their hips move together slowly at first but they are both achingly hard, desperately wanting, and it isn’t long until they are rutting against each other ungraceful, frantic.

 

The outsider makes a broken sound, thrusting up against him, unable to stop the noises and words that follow, incapably. “I— wouldn’t have,” he chokes, gripping raggedly at the back of his neck, “not even if— even if Fate had demanded it, Corvo—”

 

 _Damn Fate,_ Corvo thinks, and kisses him.

 

Swallows whatever other words he had begun to form, biting at his lips. His fingers claw into Corvo’s arms, as Corvo grasps his cock, and pumps them together with one hand, “Please,” he gasps, his legs locking around Corvo’s waist as they find that sweet, unsteady rhythm, “please, please.”

 

Almost quiet, until his voice fractures, muffled in the hollow of Corvo’s throat, his arms slung around Corvo’s neck. Until he goes rigid, bucking against Corvo’s palm and spilling, hot, over his fist, Corvo following him there, coming so hard he sees white.

 

The aftershocks ripple through them, clinging to each other. The outsider turns his head, his nose brushing Corvo’s jaw, his breath warm and damp against his skin, body limp, shaking, arms still thrown around him.

 

He could stay like this for hours, Corvo thinks.

 

He would be blissfully, eternally happy if he never moved again.

 

Underneath him, sticky with sweat and seed, the outsider reaches up, and curls his fingers around the whalebone cord.

 

“You wear it for me,” he says, and for a moment he sounds unbearably sad, a tortured edge to the thickness of his voice— gone, so quickly that Corvo thinks he must have imagined it. “I know you do.”

 

Beyond the tall, arched windows thunder rolls quietly in the distance, a summer storm drumming over the rooftops. Corvo stays awake for a long time after the outsider fallen asleep beside him, running his hands through his hair, listening to the steady beat of the rain.

 

The ring twists easily off of his finger, when he tugs at it. And something immense comes loose in his chest, as he drops it into the bedside table drawer.

 

 _Damn Fate,_ he thinks. _And the court, and the Abbey, whoever tries to take him from me._

 

_Stay. Let him stay._

 

He folds himself against the outsider’s back, his arms wrapped tight around his waist.

 

And when he wakes, the space beside him is cold, and empty.

 


	6. PART VI // UNDERTOW

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an ode to [emilia:](http://oxygen-free.tumblr.com)
> 
> in the deep dark depths of january, a blogger i had never spoken to before messaged me + said that she’d drawn some art for my corvosider fic. for some reason i remember exactly where i was at the time— having a coffee in this little snug corner at the library— and what i was doing— skipping my astronomy lecture, lmao— and then proceeding to quietly freak out over the art she’d made, which is evocative + beautiful + the stuff of my dreams. em, in the time i have had the privilege of knowing you, i have sent you multiple embarrassing drunk/3am texts, you have sent me the best emotionally charged inspo music i could ever ask for, + we both have had a major crisis moment over the containers in which our respective countries sell their milk. anyway that’s pretty much everything friendship is made of + before you read any further i need you to know that i wouldn’t have finished this without you. you are a superstar xxx 
> 
> for anyone who hasn’t seen her amazing art, her art blog is [here](http://blu3mila.tumblr.com/), and the incarnate drawings are [here](http://blu3mila.tumblr.com/post/138406941961/thank-you-so-much-for-this-absolutely-amazing)
> 
> **UPDATE 08/15/2016** more [absolutely stunning art](http://luccorvus.tumblr.com/post/148893968130/the-outsider-as-a-human-i-recently-read) made for this fic by [luccorvus](http://luccorvus.tumblr.com/) on tumblr! i'm cryin it's gorgeous
> 
> without further ado:

 

_You, drowning_

  _between my arms—_

_stay._

— Ocean Vuong

 

_—_

 

It’s always been said that there is a process to grieving.

 

Disbelief, and denial. Then anger. And sorrow.

 

Corvo has been through it one time too many: Jessamine’s last gasps of his name, the scrape and clang of cell bars, the smoke-stained sky spiraling overhead as the Whalers’ boat cut through the watery streets. He knows it in empty shrines. Vacant dreams.

 

The bedsheets beside him have been cold for hours, and Corvo feels the hated, familiar routine start all over again.

 

_No—_

 

He throws back the covers frantically, feet hitting the floor, _no no no not again not like this—_

 

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do, tugging on his boots, throwing his coat over the thin-threaded shirt of his sleepwear, yanking up his trousers, and he doesn’t know what he’ll say, when he finds him— _if he finds him—_ he only knows that he cannot lose him, not now that he’s _had_ him—

 

The Tower gardens, yes, he’ll check for him there, first. Then the Flooded District, then— oh, hell, he doesn’t know, the whole damn city, _what are you thinking, he could be crossing the channel by now and what will you do, then?_ _How many times will you find yourself chasing after him? How many times will he leave you, how many times will you be too late to beg him to stay?_

_Didn’t you swear you would never try to cage him?_

_He is not of this world, Corvo._

_Did you forget?_

The outsider has been a god for 4000 years but Corvo had held him in his arms for a matter of hours and believed that each one of his forevers was within his reach— yes, he had forgotten, he had let himself think that it wouldn’t tip the balance of their worlds, that he could have him both ways, mortal and godly, timeless and tangible. He had thought that he could stroke back his hair and still let him be wild, kiss him and keep him free.

 

But never _keep_ him.

 

Never cage him.

 

He had tried to keep his longing locked away and it had felt like trying to keep the tides from rising, like seeking a way to paint over the fire of the stars overhead. He had _tried—_ what else could he have done? He would have given anything, if only the outsider had asked _—_

Hope is insatiable.

 

_But it isn’t everlasting, and neither are you._

Corvo stops short, halfway down the throne room stairs.

 

What does he have to offer a god, other than what he has offered already?

 

There is no fight left in him.

 

For a long time now, he’s not sure there has been any.

 

He grips the railing, fingers shaking, and shudders out a breath, slowly. Then he passes over denial, anger, and sorrow, and takes the place that acceptance offers him.

  

—

 

It is Callista who finds him, holed up in Jessamine’s old study.

 

The room is almost spectral, the furniture hidden behind tomb-white drapes. It has been largely untouched since Emily’s return to the palace. Corvo has drawn back the drapes from the dusty glass of the windowpanes, and outside the storm continues to rage, clouds churning, struck through with cracks of lightning.

 

“I thought you might be here,” says Callista, softly, to not startle him. She’s holding a tray, tea and biscuits. “Emily told me that your guest has left us. And that you haven’t eaten, since last night.”

 

Corvo watches the rain strike the glass and fall to the sill. “I don’t need anything.”

 

She sets down the tray anyway. “Perhaps some company.”

 

“No, thank you, Callista—”

 

She pulls up a sheet-covered stool, and sits, ignoring his sigh, and his tired eyes. “Corvo,” she says, leaning forward, her elbows resting on her knees, propping her chin up with the heel of her hand. “He wasn’t from Serkonos, was he.”

 

Corvo blinks up at her, startled. “No,” he admits after a moment, flushing. “I— I did know him. But it was from a different life.” He looks away, bites down on the waver in his voice. “It doesn’t matter, anymore.”

 

"Who was he?"

 

“You wouldn't believe me."

 

“I could try." His eyes fall closed for a moment as she reaches up, turns his face toward her, her palm warm against the blue-brown stubble of his jaw. She studies him for a long time, silently, searching his face until her eyes alight, and some semblance of realization dawns. “Perhaps it's the wrong question,” she says at last, in her kind of quiet, thoughtful surprise. "Who was he to you?"

 

Corvo’s throat closes up in dread; his stomach drops to his feet.

 

But she takes his hand, her words gentle, like she is calming the wild nerves of a spooked stallion. “Corvo, do you remember my uncle’s trial?”

 

He does, of course he does— although no one speaks of it now. It had been an awful business, years ago. A poisoned Lord, his vengeful lackeys, the Abbey, snapping at Curnow’s heels. Quite an effort had been made to take the guard captain down, and it had been his luck and his blessing, that Jessamine had sided with him.

 

“He was found innocent,” Corvo says.

 

“But he wasn’t, truly.”

 

“The Courts decreed—”

 

“Uncle is not a bad man,” Callista soothes him. “And neither are you, but Corvo, we both know that there are secrets that the both of you would take to your graves.”

 

Corvo thinks of the torturer’s smeared-scarlet corpse, of the broken, burned shrine in the pub attic. Of Curnow after the trial, in the deep, cloaked shadows of the palace halls, weeping into the crook of another man’s neck and the Heart’s voice, _his first lover was a soldier from Tyvia; h_ _e killed to keep him a secret._

 

“If I could give Geoff anything,” Callista says, steady eyes trained on Corvo’s, “it would be freedom from the choice between secrecy, and misery. If I could give you anything, Corvo, it would be that same freedom.”

                     

She squeezes his fingers in hers, links them together, and only then does Corvo realize—

 

She isn’t wearing her ring, either.

 

“I can’t marry you,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

 

“I know,” Callista answers, “it’s all right. I was dreading it a bit, myself.”

 

They sit there, then, together, silently. Callista pours him a cup of tea and he takes it, this time, without protest. She draws her legs up to her chest, her skirt folded neatly over her thighs; beyond the window panes, the storm begins to dissipate, the clouds thinning into mist. They watch the sun creep through the city haze, the soaked coast-shores muted orange, and Corvo feels the raw pain in his chest expand. Tighten. Ache.

 

He's done this before. 

 

He can do this again. 

 

Picking up the pieces, scraping himself together—

 

But then he hears it.

 

Or— _feels_ it, more like: familiar, to the point of intimacy. The pulse in his ribs, like audiograph static behind his eyes, the itch burning over the back of his left hand. It startles him out of his seat, knocking him into the table, tea sloshes over the rim of his cup and splatters onto the thick carpet. “Corvo?” says Callista, half-rising out of her own seat, startled. “What is it?”

 

He yanks off his glove.

 

His Mark glows gold.

 

—

 

The Heart is where he’s left it, faded and pulsing weakly underneath the frame of his bed. The moment he takes it in his palm, the words pour out like the bursting of a dam, _listen,_ it gasps, _listen—_

“I am,” mutters Corvo, dropping to his knees, clutching it like the cast of a net, thrown to a half-drowned sailor, “I’m listening, what—”

 

_The Leviathan, returned to the Sea_ _._

 

So he has left, truly left. Returned to the Void. The breath presses out of his lungs in a flood; he curls over the Heart, cheek pressed against the soft pulses of its beat. How else could it have ended? What else should he have expected? _Be glad that you had what you did,_ he thinks, _for the time that you did._

 

 _He woke,_  says the Heart, and _felt a terrible pain._

 

“Pain?” Corvo closes his eyes, not understanding. “Why—”

 

 _Do you know what it is like?_ the Heart whispers. _To feel the weight of the world, all at once?_

 

The outsider had said that, Corvo remembers, that first day, out on Samuel’s schooner. He had asked, and Corvo had lied, even with the bitterness of memories he will never be able to forget, the truths he will never be able to change.

 

_Do you know what it is like?_

 

“It’s _—_ too late.” The words catch. He slumps back on his heels, staring down at the Heart, and its secrets. “He chose to go, there’s nothing I can do—”

 

_Do you know what it is like?_

 

“I wouldn’t know how to find him,” Corvo says, helplessly. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

 

The Heart swells, hot in his hand, and thuds, once. _With this Heart,_ _you will hear many secrets. And it will guide you, listen—_

 

He stands, the answer dizzying. The Heart thuds again in confirmation, as he surges to his feet.

_You will never see him again, if you do not go now._

 

It is not the Heart’s voice that tells him this, nor any of the ghosts from his past. He knows grief, he has been undone by it, over and over again— and he knows, his certainty overwhelming, that he will have lost him forever, if he does not follow where she leads.

 

And hope is, as it has always been, insatiable.

 

—

 

The Heart’s voice drifts alongside the coast as he picks his way over the wetted blue stones, cradling it careful and close to his chest. As he had started toward the open ocean, its pace had picked up, beating rapidly against his coat. _He went into the water,_ she tells him now, _into the foam of the sea, begging to be forgiven. In the moments before the Void reclaimed him, the waves dragged him down, and he was grateful._

“He was here?” asks Corvo, hushed. Mist curls beneath the heavy press of his boots, and he feels the brink of something awful and impending looming up before him.

_Stumbling and aching,_ answers the Heart. _He woke, and felt a terrible pain._

The stones give way to the soggy slide of peninsula sand. Only yesterday— _truly, only yesterday?—_ they had walked here together: there above is the slope of grass-pricked earth where Callista had offered crumbs to the gulls. And there, Samuel and Emily had muddied their fingers prying up coquinas. There, Corvo thinks, pausing, a sharp pang in his chest. The outsider had kicked through the surf, hands in his pockets, black hair wind-tousled and blown back from his forehead. Gazing up at him. Asking, _What if—_

 

The shrine’s cove looms out of the fog, jagged and storm-battered. _Hurry,_ urges the Heart, and Corvo ducks under the rocky overhang, and into the cavern’s shadows.

 

Falling into the Void has always felt like the forgotten minute before finding sleep; vision blurring, the sensation of sinking, plunging backwards. Corvo splays his palm flat over the wood grain of the shrine, the Heart drumming frantically in the clutches of his other hand, and the solidity of the world around him slides away from under his feet like the pull of a riptide.

 

The Void is darker than he has ever seen it, encased in high-towered shadows and ink-tides, lapping silently at the toe of his boots. All crumbling ruins, jagged cliff-face. Corvo sees fire-blue oil, running slick like blood, sees broken trawlers, the skeletal remains caught mid-air, hanging, warped into metal bones, the half-eaten carcasses of sailors’ dreams.

_You never believed him to be anything but heartless, soulless._

_He is no longer either. He wishes he was both._

He feels his presence before he sees him, a prickle at the back of his skull. And when he turns he is there behind him, hovering, needlessly, inches off the ground. Shoulders back. Mouth a sharp, thin line.

 

Corvo searches his eyes, and finds them black, and hollow.

 

“You are not supposed to be here,” the outsider says.

 

His tone is distant, aloof, as if he is scolding a child who has put their hand too close to a hot stove; it is the way he had spoken to Corvo all those months ago, watching him worship. Watching him pour his soul out into his hands and offer it up, watching him swallow down his pride to give room to longing.

 

Watching Corvo give everything. Giving Corvo nothing in return.

 

Here and now Corvo holds the Heart to his chest, a tremor in his fingers, and thinks, _this time, it will be different._

 

“She led me to you,” he says. Somehow his voice is steady. “To bring you back."

 

“Back,” echoes the outsider, flatly.

 

“To the Tower.” Corvo lowers his hand, feels the Heart’s beat thudding as fast as the spiking pulse in his own chest. “Back— home, with me."

 

The outsider turns away, arms folded loosely across the slender branch of his chest. “I belong here,” he says. His indifference cuts, sharp, but Corvo remembers the whispers, _hurry._ “I have always belonged here.”

 

“Not always,” Corvo says. “Not anymore.”

 

“My return has restored balance. Everything is as it should be, the Void created me, and I must serve it.”

 

 _He woke,_ the Heart murmurs, a reminder. _And felt a terrible pain._

 

The god’s shoulders stiffen, feeling him draw near— but he does not move to put the distance back between them. “Tell me why you came."

 

“It hardly matters, now that I've gone."

 

“It matters to me.”

 

“You always knew I would leave,” he replies, lifting his chin to the empty, colorless sky, still turned away. Corvo cannot see his face, cannot read whatever truth he might find there. “I am not of your world. I do not share the weakness of your kind, and you are no longer of interest to me—”

 

“Gods,” Corvo says, “do not lie.”

 

The four words strike as though he has fired a crossbolt through the god’s spine.

 

His head snaps, sharply, to the side, teeth bared as his black otter-eyes meet Corvo’s, burning hot with fury, accusing. “It is _your_ fault,” he accuses, voice spiking high, “if I have been tainted, it is _your_ doing— I should tear you to pieces for the things you’ve done to me! I have ruined my Chosen for less— _leave_ , consider me merciful, chain yourself to your daughter's tutor and find someone else to worship!”

 

_Can’t you hear him, crying out?_

 

“There is no one else,” Corvo says, softly, taking another step, tucking the Heart into the folds of his coat. “Nor would I wish for there to be.”

 

“ _Don’t—”_ The inches between him and the smooth rock beneath his feet vanish as he drops to the ground; the word seems to tear itself from his chest, unbidden, “You don’t understand!” he cries, the ageless, smooth contours of his face contorting as the false front shatters. “It’s— oh, it’s hurting, it was supposed to stop _hurting—”_

Corvo moves close, shrinking the space between them, near enough to touch but waiting, holding back. “Please,” he says, “please, I won’t marry her. Come back with me. You have never been selfless, be selfish, now. I’m asking you. I’m asking you to.”

 

The rise and fall of his chest catches like seaweed splitting on rocks, trembling between breaths the way his voice has begun to shatter between his lips. “I’ve barely a heart,” he says, pleadingly. “I will never have a soul—”

 

“You have mine,” Corvo tells him. “Take it.”

 

And his hands are cradling the outsider’s face between his palms.

 

And the outsider’s fingers are fixing in Corvo’s coat.

 

And Corvo feels it when he goes limp, holding both the frightened man and the defiant god between his hands, breathing out warm, feeling the outsider say his name against his lips, cold, wild, foolish, and then—

  

—

Nothing.

 

Nothingness.

 

Blinding, almost. Dazed white light.

 

Silence.

 

It presses down on him, weighing heavy, muffled over his ears. He blinks, rapidly, to clear his vision; his arms hold nothing but air. His hands fall to his sides. He is alone.

 

Still he feels— something. A presence, surrounding him.

 

**Lord Protector.**

 

Corvo hears it echo around him, rolling low and deep; when he spins, turning fast on his heel, he sees no one.

 

“Where is he?” he calls, faint and feeble to his own ears. The Heart is quiet. “Tell me where’ve you taken him—”

 

 **You would make demands of me?** The voice carries the pretense of amusement, light and mocking, but beneath it, Corvo can hear the current of bitter hatred, crawling over his skin. **You would deprive me of my only servant.**

Corvo swallows, hard. “It is his choice,” he says. “Not mine.”

**He begged me** **to be granted a second chance at Providence. You would not understand. You are mortal. He is not.**

“He could choose to be.”

 

 **This,** hisses the Void, **is not his Kingdom. He is not my King. He was an offering—**

“Let him choose.”

 

 **HE WAS AN OFFERING.** Around him, the world shudders, and Corvo’s pulse spikes in his throat, swallowing back panic, and fear. **You think you know the future? You think your tomorrows are set in stone?** In the spans of a breath the Void crumbles, ripping apart the foundations of the sphere around him, shaping into something new. In front of him now stands the Abbey gates, tipped sharp and proud; within, Corvo sees:

 

Himself, standing at the altar, fitted royally, Callista at his side. Their fingers are intertwined, vows falling from their lips as the rings are exchanged. Blue eyes watching, from the crowd, hateful, and haunted.

 

The scene changes. Corvo sees hidden palace halls, his own weeping apologies hidden, like Curnow’s, against the outsider’s neck. He sees careful meetings, paranoid trysts. Kissing in dark corners, keeping a lover like a secret. He sees Overseers. Masks like death. Pointed fingers, witch-hunt accusations; he sees Emily, torn from him, the word _heretic. Infidel._ Black hair and pale skin, devoured by flames. The silver swing of an axe, against his neck—

 

“No,” he gasps, stumbling back. And again, more firmly, wiping the vision from his mind like mist from thick glass, “No.”

 

 **That is your tomorrow,** comes the Void's answer. **That is what you fight for, your stupid, pointless struggle to keep a Creature that does not belong to you—**

 

Corvo curls his fingers into his palms. He shuts his eyes.

 

And against the black inside of his lids, he paints a different picture.

 

A dark head on his pillow. Tempers, flaring raw and fiery, the stuttered, heart-worn apologies that follow. Poisoned dreams and reaching for him, when he cries. Cradling him to his chest, pressing lips to his temple.

 

He imagines years, passing. Emily, willow-grown and tall, taking the outsider's hand, twirling him through clumsy ballroom steps.

 

Corvo's Marked hand, tracing thin wrinkles in his once-smooth face. Fingers finding tree-root veins, winding blue along the inside of his wrists, the backs of his knees.

 

Watching black hair fade to silver-gray.

 

And yes, Corvo knows, he will die, but Corvo will have loved him. And he will have been loved in return— and when his chest no longer rises, and falls, Corvo will wrap him in white sails, and lower him beneath the waves.

 

 _And the Leviathan,_ whispers the Heart, fluttering faintly against his breastbone, _will return to the Sea._

 

**_YOU THINK YOU KNOW—_ **

 

The Void’s fury is the blackening of the empty sky, gathering storm clouds, frozen whitecaps. The metallic scream of cuts shrilly through the empty cosmos, vine-like shadows snapping up at his heels, tightening around his wrists, ankles. Corvo feels an animal fear seize him and hold him there, the taste of blood filling his mouth as his teeth sink into the flesh of his own tongue, the Void roaring in his ears—

 

As suddenly as the torrent has begun, it subsides.

 

And like gentle wind after rain:

 

**Then take him.**

 

Resigned. Weary.

 

**Go.**

 

The purchase of its grip on him withdraws. The blackened tendrils curl away, fading slowly until he slips from its hold entirely, and plummets, at last, into free-fall.

 

—

 

The ocean breeze is cool, on his skin. The rush of watery breakers soaks into his clothes, the grit of sand pillows beneath his head. Tapered fingers shake in his hair, stroking matted tangles back from his forehead, whispers and whimpers mingling in the same breath.

 

_Dearest, darling, Corvo, please—_

 

He opens his eyes.

 

The outsider is bent over him, hands petting through his hair, Corvo’s head in his lap. Sea foam creeps up with the tide and bubbles around them, willing them back to the water. “How—” Corvo coughs, retches, his throat burning. “What—?”

 

“You fell,” says the outsider. "And I— I followed."

 

He is trembling. His face is pale, his hair plastered to his forehead; rain runs thin rivers from his forehead to his chin. His lashes are damp with tears, his eyes—

 

Corvo has never been so relieved to see the color blue.

 

“I thought—” the outsider says, fingers twisting frantically in Corvo’s hair. “I pulled you to shore, and you weren’t, I thought you’d—”

 

He tastes of salt, when Corvo tips his chin down, and finds his lips— he tastes the way Corvo had used to dream he would, sea-soaked. But he is blessedly warm. Hot-blooded, sighing into Corvo’s mouth.

 

"I was so afraid," he whispers, nose brushing Corvo's cheek, eyes shuddering shut. "I am," he adds, shakily, "even now— is that what it is like for you, too?"

 

Corvo takes his hand. Kisses his wrist, his palm, his fingers. "For me?"

 

"Loving," says the outsider. His hand untangles from Corvo's hair, and rests, gently, at his throat. "Will it always feel like this?"

 

The Heart is silent, tucked into the drowned lining of his jacket. The sand shifts under them as Corvo rises up on his knees, kissing him deep, fervent; when he pulls away it is only to reach beneath his shirt, at the _v_ of his collar, and lift the carving from around his neck. The outsider’s fingers skim over Corvo’s knuckles as the cord slips over his head; whalebone swings, then settles, over the smooth expanse of his chest.

 

"Not always," Corvo says. "But when you've waited, for a long time— then, yes. It does."

 

And as high tide falls from the shore, they find their footing, and make their way back to the Tower, toward tomorrow—

 

And tomorrow—

 

And tomorrow.

  

— 

   

_"What is Real? Does it hurt?"_

 

_"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “But when you are Real, you don't mind."_

 

_"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"_

 

_"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time…but once you are Real, you can't become unreal again._

_It lasts for always.”_

 

\- Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a big gross thank you goes out to:
> 
> ⁃ my luminescent housemate/drinking buddy/beta [madison](http://lost-balloons.com) for sharing your wine with me + also for editing this + entertaining my ranting about it even though you have never played dishonored, bless
> 
> ⁃ [emilia](http://oxygen-free.tumblr.com) (again), who i cherish and adore and need in my life always
> 
> ⁃ [liro](http://rgb-hex.tumblr.com/) who is Too Aesthetic + topped off with talent + has a supreme sense of humor: thank you for the support, golden museum-frame-worthy drawings, hilarious convos, + for getting me into black sails
> 
> ⁃ everyone who commented/left kudos/bookmarked/subscribed: thank you thank you thank you. i’ve become much more confident in myself and my writing, and it means a lot that you’ve all been there at some point to see me through
> 
> last but not least, link to my [tumblr](http://bygoneboy.tumblr.com) in case you want to come say hello. and that’s all, folks! it's been wild xx


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